Editorial Reviews
Midwest Book Review
Gibbons In The Family Tree is the story of a family who complicated their lives and their travels with pets of all sorts but the emphasis is on the gibbons Penny and Pogo. Gibbons are the smallest and loveliest of the ape family. Penny and Pogo joined the Vanderhoef family in Bangkok, Thailand, as babies. These charming little characters soon ruled the lives, possessed the hearts, and brought more laughter and chaos into the Vanderhoefs lives than can be imagined. Readers will be both fascinated and amused by Penny and Pogo's inventiveness, humor, problems, and antics, as well as by the ways and means the family coped with the special situations created by members of the "zoo", at home, on the road, and overseas. Gibbons In The Family Tree is wonderful reading for anyone with an interest in pets and wildlife, or who has ever given thought to the possibility of having a simian for a pet.
From a published review
If warm, wry Erma Bombeck had been one part animal trainer, she might have come across like Jeanne Anne Vanderhoef.
Gibbons in the Family Tree is Charlottesville writer Vanderhoef's comic memoir about acquiring, embracing and enduring two diminutive but dynamic wild things.
"These are not monkeys,: she explains patiently of the titular simians. "They are apes."
But Vanderhoef, wife of an army intelligence officer, administered quite a menagerie to begin with.
One of the dogs, Pruno, was a Great Dane, brindled, reasonably confused in some quarters with a full-grown tiger. The other, Yorick, was a black mutt who looked small only when standing next to Pruno. The cat, Tucky, was large, white and, in the manner of all felines, beset by social inferiors.
Then there were the three kids--Craig, Lee and Christy.
The idea, back in 1956, was for Col. and Mrs. Vanderhoef to get this crew across country from Vienna, Va., to San Francisco in a station wagon, thence by ship to Bangkok, Thailand, where he had been assigned as American adviser to the Thai Intelligence School.
Her father being a career cavalry officer, Vanderhoef was fairly accustomed to such long-distance troop movements.
but the papers weren't exactly in order, of course. Pruno had diarrhea, an oppressive ailment in a crowded motorcar. The dogs got loose in Mazata, Minn
Bears attacked the family bags at Yellowstone Park, which was OK, because those bags would sail for the Far East on the wrong ship anyway.
And tigerlike Pruno was called upon to save their lives with his intimidating presence from a howling mob in stopover Hong Kong.
All of which explains why the gibbons, penny and Pogo, purchased in a Dickensian pet shop near a Buddhist temple, didn't seem like such dig deal at the time.
They joined Pruno, Yorick and Tucky, along with a pair of mongoose, two guinea pigs, an assortment of snakes and a barging crane named (what else?) Ichabod.
"Wildlife additions to the household," writes Vanderhoef blithely," you happened to be a family of animal lovers, seemed a natural sort of thing in Bangkok."
Back in Vienna, at the end of the colonel's tour, they drew crowds at the national attention of Parade magazine, in the company of an additional horse, a pony, two goats and a Siclian Burro..
But the Pert, pansy-faced gibbons remained the uncontested headliners. . . .
Gibbons is an irresistible account of fauna and family. Vanderhoef's husband has retired, her children have married, and she is now 77. her mother, Janet Lambert, was a best-selling author of books for teenage girls, so she has turned to yet another hereditary talent.
Gibbons in the Family Tree
Gibbons in the Family Tree,Jeanne Ann Vanderhoef,Brunswick Pub Co,1556181612,1918-,Anecdotes,Apes & Monkeys,Biography & Autobiography / General,Gibbons,Gibbons as pets,Nature,Nature/Ecology,Pets / General,Vanderhoef, Jeanne Ann,,Virginia,Biography,Human-animal relationships,Humor,Pets,Vanderhoef, Jeanne Ann
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