By Thomas French
Welcome to the savage and excellent international of Zoo Story, an extraordinary account of the key lifetime of a zoo and its population, either animal and human. according to six years of analysis, the booklet follows a handful of unforgettable characters at Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo: an alpha chimp with a weak point for blondes, a ferocious tiger who revels in Obsession body spray, and a super yet tyrannical CEO referred to as El Diablo Blanco.
Zoo Story crackles with problems with worldwide urgency: the shadow of extinction, humanity's function within the destruction or survival of different species. greater than the rest, even though, it's a dramatic and relocating actual tale of seduction and betrayal, exile and loss, and the bounds of freedom on an overcrowded planet--all framed inside of one zoo reinventing itself for the twenty-first century.
Thomas French, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, chronicles the motion with bright energy: Wild elephants hovering above the Atlantic on their approach to captivity. Predators circling one another in a deadly mating dance. Primates plotting the overthrow in their king. The sweeping narrative takes the reader from the African savannah to the forests of Panama and deep into the internal workings of a spot a few describe as a sanctuary and others condemn as a jail. it all involves lifestyles within the book's four-legged characters. Even animal fans should be startled by way of the emotional cost of those creatures' histories, which learn as if they have been co-written through Dickens and Darwin.
Zoo Story indicates us how those striking contributors reside, how a few die, and what their stories display in regards to the human wish to either exalt and regulate nature.