Search results for ""Author Brad Bigelow""

Virginia Hutton embarks upon an experiment. She will take an ape and raise it as a human child. She purchases an infant orangutan and names him Appius. She clothes him, feeds him, and puts him to bed in a cot every night. As Appius grows older, she teaches him to dress himself, to speak, to read, to stand and walk up straight, to eat his meals at the dining table with a knife and fork. She teaches him how to be human. The young orangutan is not always a willing student. His relationship with Virginia becomes fraught and flits between that of mother and child, teacher and student, scientist and experiment. But as Appius gains knowledge he moves ever closer to the one discovery Virginia does not want him to make: that of his true origins. Appius and Virginia explores the ongoing conflict between nature and nurture. It is also a chilling and unforgettable portrait of loneliness.

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Secrets and Lives offers thirteen strikingly diverse explorations of memory - its dangers and its possibilites. Its subjects range from a kidnapped woman trapped on the Isle of Skye in the 18th century to a young man in Mumbai dealing with the death of his parents. Its settings range from Vietnam and Australia to Essex, Sussex and Norfolk, its sources from folk songs and old diaries to television and Twitter. And the secrets it reveals demonstrate the endless capacity of creative nonfiction to illuminate our world in all its aspects, familiar and unfamiliar.

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