Going Bananas

Marvin Ginsburg looks back on the years his family shared with Joey, a chimpanzee they adopted as a baby. He began the project as a true story for children, meant to capture the fun and happiness of their adventures together. While he wrote, those happy years became harder to separate from his unease about how Joey had been taken from the place where he belonged.

The book is illustrated in bright, colorful pictures, and it uses Joey's story to explain the harm that captivity does to animals. Ginsburg acknowledges that nothing can undo what happened to Joey. He wrote the book to tell young readers, and their parents, that wild animals should never be captured or kept in confinement, and that they can only be truly content when they are free to live naturally in the wild.

Although the book is aimed at children, its central lesson applies to everyone. It is an animal advocacy book built on the idea that people share a collective responsibility to give animals the freedom they deserve.