Books: Fun With Fauna

How TO TELL YOUR FRIENDS FROM THE APES — Will Cuppy — Liveright ($1.75).* Publisher Liveright announces that there are 1,723 good laughs in this book. Translated into plainer English that means about 23. In short, How to Tell Your Friends From the Apes is an unusually funny, humorous book. A take-off on zoologists, anthropologists, the human race in general, this solemnly annotated guide book makes surprisingly good sense.

Author Cuppy covers the entire rise of Man, from the Java to the Modern Man ("or Nervous Wreck") in 14 pages. He concludes this section: "All Modern Men are descended from a Wormlike creature but it shows more on some people." In brief but adequate sketches he disposes of the Apes. "When a Chimpanzee looks at another Chimp he does not see what we see. They frequently have twins." Author Cuppy can jargon with the best of them: "The Gorilla could do with more brains. His corpus callosum is not very good but the hippocampus major is O. K. The hallux is fair." "The family life of the Baboon is known as hell on earth. The males grow meaner and stingier and the females fade at an early age. The children scream, stamp, roll on the ground and will not eat their Centipedes." "The average Penguin has the mind of an eight-year-old child but he gets his pic ture in the Sunday papers."