Love at Goon Park by Deborah Blum, Perseus, $26, ISBN 0738202789 Reviewed by Louise Barrett
TINY infant monkeys clinging desperately to crude artificial “cloth-mothers” seems a gratuitously brutal way of showing the importance of the mother-offspring bond in primates. I first came across Harry Harlow’s experiments on infant monkeys as an undergraduate and found the images of isolated infants disturbing. Indeed, I couldn’t work out why such experiments were necessary when the findings seemed so obvious.
Now, thanks to Deborah Blum’s enormously interesting biography of Harlow, I realise that, during the first half of the 20th century, the importance of…
