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Life in the Garden of Captives
Hyperion
July 2010
On Sale: July 6, 2010
304 pages ISBN: 1401323464 EAN: 9781401323462 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Welcome to the savage and surprising world of Zoo Story, an
unprecedented account of the secret life of a zoo and its
inhabitants, both animal and human. Based on six years of
research, the book follows a handful of unforgettable
characters at Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo: an alpha chimp with a
weakness for blondes, a ferocious tiger who revels in
Obsession perfume, and a brilliant but tyrannical CEO known
as El Diablo Blanco. Zoo Story crackles with issues of global urgency: the shadow
of extinction, humanity's role in the destruction or
survival of other species. More than anything else, though,
it's a dramatic and moving true story of seduction and
betrayal, exile and loss, and the limits of freedom on an
overcrowded planet--all framed inside one zoo reinventing
itself for the twenty-first century. Thomas French, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, chronicles
the action with vivid power: Wild elephants soaring above
the Atlantic on their way to captivity. Predators circling
each other in a lethal mating dance. Primates plotting the
overthrow of their king. The sweeping narrative takes the
reader from the African savannah to the forests of Panama
and deep into the inner workings of a place some describe as
a sanctuary and others condemn as a prison. All of it comes
to life in the book's four-legged characters. Even animal
lovers will be startled by the emotional charge of these
creatures' histories, which read as though they were
co-written by Dickens and Darwin. Zoo Story shows us how these remarkable individuals live,
how some die, and what their experiences reveal about the
human desire to both exalt and control nature.
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