Film - Project Nim - directed by James Marsh

Star rating – 7/10

The latest documentary from James Marsh, director of ‘Man on Wire’ about daring high wire walking between the Twin Towers, is about a very different subject. ‘Project Nim’ tells of a very strange and sad experiment that took place at Columbia University in New York in the 1970s.

Psychologist Herb Terrace was trying to see if he could get a primate to string a sentence together from its own thought process, rather than just mimicking human behaviour. And so he took a new born chimpanzee from its poor mother, who had also had her previous six babies removed from her immediately after birth for other experiments, and gave it to his ex girlfriend to rear as one of her children. This could only have happened in the 70s – imagine if your ex boyfriend asked you to look after and breastfeed a chimp and treat it like a human child – and without hesitation, or any real discussion with your husband or children, you said yes.... That’s what New Yorker Stephanie LaFarge did. And she treated Nim very sentimentally as one of her children – too sentimentally really.

There were no boundaries or rules – she even breastfed Nim. She was supposed to be treating him like a child – it’s not clear from the film whether giving him alcohol and marijuana were activities her real children also engaged in, but Nim certainly did, and he liked them both quite a lot. There are very touching scenes with Nim playing happily with the family cats and other children. Then he is snatched away from the family he had developed strong bonds with, and taken to an empty mansion with a sign language teacher and Professor Herb – to develop more strong bonds that would ultimately be broken and betrayed.

Hardly any of the humans involved in this doomed and very wrong project come out of it very well at all. Especially the creepy Frankenstein like Professor Herb, who seemed to end up sleeping with every female he came into contact with. Goodness knows what they saw in a guy with such a terrible comb over but there’s no accounting for taste.

Nim learns to manipulate the humans to get what he wants – via sign language and other means. But it is always the humans who are really firmly in control of this grotesque experiment. Nim was a very strong and powerful animal – with the strength of five humans. No thought was given to the effect of the experiment on this beautiful life. This point is brought out very well by James Marsh in the film. It is ultimately a very sad tale, where a life is manipulated and played with; Nim is given a taste of human life, then relegated to an even worse reality than he started out with. And the purpose of the whole ghastly experiment – to see whether Nim can make his own sentences – is not proven either way – so it was one very sad, bad, waste of time, and much more bedsides.

Books - I’m Feeling Lucky – The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

Star rating – 5/10

This account by Google’s former director of consumer marketing and brand management, Douglas Edwards, starts off really well, but in the end just feels like a bit of a whinge by a disgruntled employee.

Edwards’ story starts with much promise, as he entered the Google world when they were a very small start up type business in 1999, and left six years later when they had just floated as a public company, and were on the verge of being the behemoth that they are today. He was from a very different world, having been director of marketing at an established and reputable paper, with a big pay cheque to match, before joining Google. The downsizing in salary didn’t really matter too much to him, although his wife and kids may have felt slightly differently, as he was part of an exciting new company who wanted to do things very differently to the others, and also to do very different things than anyone else was doing out there.

He initially found the Google culture a bit frustrating, with its lack of structure, control, or foundation. They also had very unconventional approaches to strategy and marketing, which made Edwards’ new role quite challenging for him. He was not used to this new world where innovation was in, and hand holding at every step of the way was definitely not. He wasn’t used to not getting reassurance that every task he competed was acceptable before moving onto the next – so he had to change fast. That bit of the story is very interesting, along with the wacky and weird details of everyday life at Google, where you could get anything your heart or body desired on site, saving you the bother of having to go home much at all really.

Edwards does not really have much time for the Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. From the book he comes across as a bit like a petulant child who needs patting on the head all the time, rather than a senior executive and vital member of the Google team. At the start of his time there he felt that his opinions were ignored or over – ridden, and towards the end he felt like a Cassandra character ‘I could see bad things on the road ahead but couldn’t stop us from recklessly rolling over them.’ And I have to say it seemed that the people who he seemed to have most problems with were women.

Reading the book, and if you had just dropped in from another planet and didn’t know about the Google success story, you might be forgiven for thinking that things were going to go drastically wrong as no one was listening to the sage words of Douglas Edwards. Now I am no Google fanatic by any means, but this book just reads like sour grapes. Which is a great shame, as it could have been a fascinating insight into the rise and rise of an international phenomenon – instead it is a bit like a long whinge. And it can’t have been that bad working as Google employee number 59, or one would presume that he would have left of his own volition, when instead Edwards was asked to leave when his position became redundant, but he did cash in on his shares before he left. C’est la vie.

Literature - Dickens Journals Online - University of Buckingham

Star rating – 9/10

It is really exciting to be part of breathing new life into historical literature in the way in which this University of Buckingham project has made possible. I, along with thousands of others, responded to the call after seeing an article in last weekend’s Observer for budding editors to help to bring long forgotten journal articles by Charles Dickens back into circulation.

The idea was to help the university team with over 1,000 editions of articles that Dickens wrote for periodicals such as ’Household Words’, later retitled, ‘All the Year Round’, that needed to be edited from the photocopies of the original articles, to iron out any spelling mistakes and other flaws in the digitally reproduced pages that the team are working with.

And what a success story this has been. Within a few days of the national publicity, so many people have rallied around and decided to be part of this exciting project, that they are currently only around 50 editions left to be edited. That’s a shame as I was just getting very excited about doing a few more, but I did get a real thrill out of editing the version I was lucky enough to get my hands on. In case you were wondering it was ‘All the Year Round’ Volume 3, No. 71, 1^st September 1860. And a jolly interesting read it was too. It’s fascinating to see how Dickens used this medium, which is really equivalent to today’s soap operas, to draw in his readers with his literary genius, and leave then wanting much more.

Let’s have more of this mass participatory stuff to breathe new life into old classics. And there is no greater writer ever to have graced this planet than Mr. Dickens in my humble opinion. Look for yourself at http://www.djo.org.uk/

Audio books – The Russia House – John le Carré

Star rating – 9/10

This is another great audio book from the original BBC Radio 4 1994 dramatisation of John le Carré’s classic cold war spy novel. And there is no-one better suited to the whisky drinking; jazz loving; tenor sax playing publisher Barley Blair than Tom Baker, who is absolutely wonderful in this part.

Blair is a very unlikely candidate for being involved in any espionage, but he gets mixed up in proceedings via a colleague at a Moscow book fair, who is given a manuscript that threatens to blow the lids on vital Russian nuclear secrets during the perestroika period. The beautiful Russian woman, Katya, (Valentina Yakunina) who hands over the manuscript, insists on Barley Blair being the only one who it should be given to. But when he is nowhere to be found back in Britain, the literary agent contacts the British authorities, as its contents are so potentially explosive.

And so a wonderfully gentle yet thrilling game of chess ensues, with Barley bumbling along as an unwilling, and often unwitting pawn in the game. The adventures take him from London to Moscow, then on the night train to Leningrad, and across the continent to America too. But Barley is not as stupid or drunk as he likes to make out, and he really has a cunning plan of his own, inevitably involving the lovely Katya.

The plot is not too intricate to follow, yet it is very engaging, with the typical le Carré twists and turns. This audio book really is a delight to listen to, and should make any long holiday car journey that bit more bearable.