ZOO: Animals, People, Places

Even if there seems to be nothing available in print except at the younger Let's Visit level, Livingston (lawyer-photographer and once-around author of The Turf -- 1973) has basted together some scattered information (is there much you didn't really know?) about ""nature's penultimate university"" which animal lovers would call a prison. The first formal zoo seems to have existed in Egypt in the 15th century B.C. and originally zoos were the divine right of royalty; later there have been some private zoos, notably Hearst's (although here Livingston talks as much about the people as the animals at San Simeon in their silver and cut-glass cage); the San Diego Zoo comes off way ahead; New York's Central Park Zoo operates poorly on a low budget; the Bronx Zoo does better. Assorted chapters deal with safari zoos and the new drive-in vogue, with dealers and traders and captors (remember Frank Buck -- ""Frank Bunk"") with a few celebrities -- Smokey Bear, Patty Cake and those Peking pandas, and you'll pick up a few incidentals (penguins mate for life; the sloth is bottlefed upside down; many visitors are perverts or suicides). There's really more animated pleasure in Curious George.