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No He's Not a Monkey, He's an Ape and He's My Son
This book answers the question that’s on everybody's mind: “What’s it like to raise a chimpanzee in Manhattan?” Hester Mundis’s hilarious memoir NO, HE'S NOT A MONKEY, HE'S AN APE AND HE'S MY SON is the complete guide to raising a chimp in the heart of urban America. Join Hester, her husband, their terrifying attack dog Ahab, and the funniest monkey -- excuse us, APE -- ever to occupy an apartment on the Upper West Side of New York City in this true adventure of woman versus beast.
Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1976
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 30, 2011
Loved this book.. especially as I go and see the chimp in question every week.
July 25, 2023
Pretty entertaining. A lot of the humor refers to dated references, but still good. I wonder what happened to Boris…
June 5, 2026
This is the true story of Hester Mundis and her then-husband buying a baby chimpanzee and raising him in a New York City apartment in the late 1960s.
IT's a testament to Mundis's storytelling that the book is charming, funny, thought-provoking and informative all at once, because its very existence is due to a monumentally stupid and impulsive act. As Mundis tells it, she and her family were bored one rainy day, went to an exotic-animal store and fell in love with a tiny chimp, and inside of a few days they'd brought him home and named him Boris, with no inkling what they or he were getting into or how any of them would survive it. I should also add that keeping a chimpanzee was illegal in NYC at the time, and the Mundises were fully aware of this, yet chose to bring home Boris anyway.
Add to that the fact that the family already owned a German shepherd named Ahab whom they pretended to visitors was only assertive but who they in fact considered vicious, and you have a pair of supremely irresponsible people.
But!
The story works in spite of itself. Mundis, an acclaimed TV writer, is hilariously candid about her own and her family's shortcomings, and their love for Boris and desire to do as right by him as they could given the ridiculous circumstances permeates the entire narrative.
Boris is a tiny chimp with a huge personality, as endearing, maddening, and surprising as a human toddler, but with strength far out of proportion to his size and a streak of deviousness and stubbornness two miles wide.
I know I would not have wanted to live in the same apartment building the Mundises lived in with their crazy dog and their ape, and they must have owned their unit outright to be able to make the built-in cage in the dining room.
As he grew older, Boris became smarter, more energetic and stronger, and the Mundises were forced to face the inevitable truth that they could not keep Boris much longer, especially as a new human baby was on the way. I give them credit for not shying away from making the painful decision to find Boris another home, and especially for their diligence in finding exactly the right zoo for him, Chester Zoo in England. I can only imagine how they felt as they said goodbye to their furry little boy.
In the afterword to the edition I have, Mundis acknowledges that if she knew then what she does now, she would never have tried to make a chimpanzee into a pet. Thank goodness!
As for Boris? He thrived at the Chester Zoo, was its star attraction, fathered over a dozen offspring, and was instrumental in advancing the field of chimpanzee preservation, raising awareness of habitat loss, poaching and the pet trade.
He died just a couple years ago at the age of 58.
RIP, Boris, I feel lucky to have known you, even if only through your human mama's book.
IT's a testament to Mundis's storytelling that the book is charming, funny, thought-provoking and informative all at once, because its very existence is due to a monumentally stupid and impulsive act. As Mundis tells it, she and her family were bored one rainy day, went to an exotic-animal store and fell in love with a tiny chimp, and inside of a few days they'd brought him home and named him Boris, with no inkling what they or he were getting into or how any of them would survive it. I should also add that keeping a chimpanzee was illegal in NYC at the time, and the Mundises were fully aware of this, yet chose to bring home Boris anyway.
Add to that the fact that the family already owned a German shepherd named Ahab whom they pretended to visitors was only assertive but who they in fact considered vicious, and you have a pair of supremely irresponsible people.
But!
The story works in spite of itself. Mundis, an acclaimed TV writer, is hilariously candid about her own and her family's shortcomings, and their love for Boris and desire to do as right by him as they could given the ridiculous circumstances permeates the entire narrative.
Boris is a tiny chimp with a huge personality, as endearing, maddening, and surprising as a human toddler, but with strength far out of proportion to his size and a streak of deviousness and stubbornness two miles wide.
I know I would not have wanted to live in the same apartment building the Mundises lived in with their crazy dog and their ape, and they must have owned their unit outright to be able to make the built-in cage in the dining room.
As he grew older, Boris became smarter, more energetic and stronger, and the Mundises were forced to face the inevitable truth that they could not keep Boris much longer, especially as a new human baby was on the way. I give them credit for not shying away from making the painful decision to find Boris another home, and especially for their diligence in finding exactly the right zoo for him, Chester Zoo in England. I can only imagine how they felt as they said goodbye to their furry little boy.
In the afterword to the edition I have, Mundis acknowledges that if she knew then what she does now, she would never have tried to make a chimpanzee into a pet. Thank goodness!
As for Boris? He thrived at the Chester Zoo, was its star attraction, fathered over a dozen offspring, and was instrumental in advancing the field of chimpanzee preservation, raising awareness of habitat loss, poaching and the pet trade.
He died just a couple years ago at the age of 58.
RIP, Boris, I feel lucky to have known you, even if only through your human mama's book.
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May 21, 2009I'll be honest: I picked this book up because of the title. But it's an ok book in itself--a fairly charming story of a woman who hand-reared a chimpanzee. The title comes from a time when her fosterling developed pneumonia, and she took him to a doctor--but except for the addition '...and he's my son', it's probably something she had to say many times.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews