| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos. By Elizabeth Hanson. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. xii, 243 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-691-05992-6.)
Elizabeth Hanson's provocative study argues that the zoo reveals how Americans understand the natural world and their place in it. Concentrating on the cultural and physical landscape of the zoo, she demonstrates how that enduring institution has from its beginnings represented an "uneasy pairing of wildness and civilization, science and popular culture, and education and entertainment" (p. 5).	1
Hanson situates the zoo as a "middle landscape" amidst the late-nineteenth-century public parks movement and analyzes the social reform aspects of zoos, which were to provide an edifying alternative to looking at exotic animals in chaotic menageries and sideshows. Drawing upon zoo records of acquisitions and donations, Hanson then charts the negotiations between the public and zoo administrators over "what sort of place the zoo should be" (p. 43). This public participation, she argues, helped strengthen the zoo as a civic institution while revealing some of the attitudes held by Americans toward nonhuman animals. Despite her effort to chart public participation using internal zoo records, however, readers may still wish to know substantially more about how Americans actually experienced zoos and what they thought about animals.	. . .

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