A Closer Look Book Club: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

When
5 to 6 p.m., April 27, 2016

This book won the Pen/Faulkner Award for 2014 and was nominated for a 2014 Nebula Award. “‘Girl and Chimp Twinned at Birth in Psychological Experiment.’ That’s the big reveal in…a novel so readably juicy and surreptitiously smart, it deserves all the attention it can get….The plot turns on a volatile moment in behavioral psychology, the late 1970s, when Skinnerian dogmatists were duking it out with proponents of a more nuanced, evolutionary grasp of animal behavior. Primate subjects were prized for the ways they resembled humans in mirror-identity tests, language acquisition and more, but could still be dispatched as property at the end of the experimental day. Meanwhile, a fledgling animal rights movement was starting to count the bodies.” Barbara Kingsolver, New York Times.