the evolution of bruno littlemore by benjamin hale

There is much thought-provoking content that makes one ponder the nature of humanity and the thin line that separates us from apes. There were also many disturbing scenes that were intentionally difficult to get through. There were certain parts that could have moved along more quickly. I stayed engaged throughout most of the book, and Hale’s style is both literary and profound. He even gets cosmetic surgery to make him look more human.īruno’s life and adventures easily fill this lengthy tome without getting too redundant and tedious.

Bruno becomes more and more human and less and less animal as he becomes Lydia’s lover and learns language. This is really when the novel begins to dip more deeply into the philosophical and existential questions of what it means to be human and what the rights of animals are. With this spectacular new skill, one of the scientists, Lydia, took Bruno home to live with her. With the help of a janitor who visited Bruno late at night at the lab, Bruno slowly learned to speak.

He stood out so much that the scientists brought him to their lab for more experiments. When a group of scientists visited the Lincoln Park Zoo to perform some cognitive tests on the chimps there, Bruno stood out for his superior abilities. The concept is intriguing, some of the writing is spectacular, but in the end, the execution fell short for me.īruno Littlemore is a very special chimpanzee. At the point, the story took several digressions as well, losing the tight focus of its beginning. He thought of himself as a human, and with that became just another narrator. At that point, Bruno was no longer an unreliable chimpanzee narrator. I was willing to suspend disbelief up to a point, but there was a tipping point when the evolution went off the rails for me. right up to the point where I felt like it went too far. But as Bruno evolves, becoming more and more human-like, he pushes against society's expectations of him. I was fascinating with the way that Bruno described how he decoded what humans mean by a wave and how the good night waves of the scientists at the laboratory differed. Hale does an excellent job capturing the world through Bruno's eyes, first as a child in the Lincoln Park Zoo, then as a research participant at the University of Chicago. 'My name is Bruno Littlemore: Bruno I was given, Littlemore I gave myself, and with some prodding I have finally decided to give this undeserving and spiritually diseased world the generous gift of my memoirs.' From the first sentence, we can tell that Bruno is well educated and thinks quite highly of himself: Show More story is told by Bruno Littlemore, a chimpanzee who is looking back on his life and narrating his memoirs.

The evolution of bruno littlemore by benjamin hale