The remarkable true story of a family who move into a rundown zoo-already a BBC documentary miniseries and excerpted in The Guardian. In the market for a house and an adventure, Benjamin Mee moved his family to an unlikely new home: a dilapidated zoo in the English countryside. Mee had a dream to refurbish the zoo and run it as a family business. His friends and colleagues thought he was crazy. But in 2006, Mee and his wife with their two children, his brother, and his 76-year-old mother moved into the Dartmoor Wildlife Park. Their extended family now included: Solomon, an African lion and scourge of the local golf course; Zak, the rickety Alpha wolf, a broadly benevolent dictator clinging to power; Ronnie, a Brazilian tapir, easily capable of killing a man, but hopelessly soppy; and Sovereign, a jaguar and would-be ninja, who has devised a long term escape plan and implemented it. Nothing was easy, given the family's lack of experience as zookeepers, and what follows is a magical exploration of the mysteries of the animal kingdom, the power of family, and the triumph of hope over tragedy. We Bought a Zoo is a profoundly moving portrait of an unforgettable family living in the most extraordinary circumstances.

Our Gigantic Zoo tells the story of Bernhard Grzimek, the most important European wildlife conservationist, and his role in creating a permanent sanctuary for innocent animals in Serengeti National Park.

An in-depth look at the radical changes occurring in our nation’s zoos—from cement-paved mazes to simulated rain forests to completely natural landscapes—as well as the history behind the actual idea of the zoo. Following the lead of private menageries in Europe, public zoos began to proliferate throughout America. What once started as symbols of prestige and power are now educational centers, developing advanced technologies in the race to conserve all that remains of the natural world. With DNA fingerprinting, artificial insemination, embryo transfers, and egg harvesting, zoos play a critical role in the fight to save endangered species.

In this book, ZOO, the author, Bernard Livingston will present a study of this world which treats it as social history. But the style will be a light-handed one similar to that of his previous social study, Their Turf, the story of the world of the racehorse and the people involved therein. It is to be hoped that the fun, drama, humor and yes, enlightenment inherent in the world of the zoo will not be lacking in this work.

An archive-based, in-depth analysis of the surreal nature and science movies of the pioneering French filmmaker Jean Painlevé Before Jacques-Yves Cousteau, there was Jean Painlevé, a pioneering French scientific and nature filmmaker with a Surrealist’s eye. Creator of more than two hundred films, his studies of strange animal worlds doubled as critical reimaginations of humanity. With an unerring eye for the uncanny and unexpected, Painlevé and his assistant Geneviève Hamon captured oneiric octopuses, metamorphic crustaceans, erotic seahorses, mythic vampire bats, and insatiable predatory insects. Zoological Surrealism draws from Painlevé’s early oeuvre to rethink the entangled histories of cinema, Surrealism, and scientific research in interwar France. Delving deeply into Painlevé’s archive, James Leo Cahill develops an account of “cinema’s Copernican vocation”—how it was used to forge new scientific discoveries while also displacing and critiquing anthropocentric viewpoints. From Painlevé’s engagements with Sergei Eisenstein, Georges Franju, and competing Surrealists to the historiographical dimensions of Jean Vigo’s concept of social cinema, Zoological Surrealism taps never-before-examined sources to offer a completely original perspective on a cutting-edge filmmaker. The first extensive English-language study of Painlevé’s early films and their contexts, it adds important new insight to our understanding of film while also contributing to contemporary investigations of the increasingly surreal landscapes of climate change and ecological emergency.