Daniel E. Bender is the Canada Research Chair in Global Culture and Professor of History at the University of Toronto.
A fascinating transnational labor, social, and cultural history of
the American zoo. Bender brilliantly shows us how workers around
the world participated in the creation of a popular American
institution, including merchants in Singapore who sold caged
animals to dealers, East African workers who captured wild animals
under horrific conditions, and the wives of self-styled 'zoo men,'
who raised countless orphaned 'zoo babies' after World War II.
Well-written and impressively researched, The Animal Game is
a groundbreaking book. -- Janet Davis, author of The Gospel of
Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America
This book could not be more timely. American zoos are contested
spaces today, caught between heated debates about conservation and
confinement. In seemingly effortless prose backed by impeccable
research, Bender shows us how today's zoos came to be. After
reading this book, you'll never go to the zoo in the same way
again. -- Jane Desmond, author of Displaying Death and Animating
Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday
Life
This moving account of the animals that have come to populate zoos
ranges from hidden histories of empire, celebrity, and taxidermy to
consideration of the ways that institutions associated with
prisons, slums, and asylums might affect their inhabitants. Mixing
labor history across species lines with keen cultural analysis,
this is a story of enclosure that opens out in remarkable ways. --
Kristin Hoganson, author of Consumers' Imperium: The Global
Production of American Domesticity
In The Animal Game, Daniel Bender offers a fresh perspective
on the twentieth-century history of American zoos. His informative
and engaging account includes vivid portraits of human and nonhuman
actors, as it details the business, the politics, and the ethics of
the acquisition and display of living animals. -- Harriet Ritvo,
author of Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and
History
What emerges is a story of adaptation and survival that exposes the
modern zoo as 'a third nature'...Those who are ethically opposed to
zoos will find plenty here to strengthen their case. But with zoos'
power of reinvention, it seems likely that this 'third nature' will
be with us for some time. -- Henry Nicholls * Nature *
A fascinating history lesson on zoos in the USA, from their
beginnings at the end of the nineteenth century through to the
1970s...Each chapter of The Animal Game is riveting and
meticulously evidenced...The reason why Bender's book shines is not
only his philosophical musings, but his intricate weaving of the
histories of ordinary and extraordinary people and animals that
have played a documented part in the narratives of U.S. zoos. --
Lauriane Suyin Chalmin-Pui * LSE Review of Books *
Bender provides a high -level history of urban zoos in the 20th-
century U.S. Sourced from the libraries and archives of several
zoos, this book and its supplemental digital content shine a light
on zoo history that was previously kept private. -- J. R. Page *
Choice *
[The Animal Game] makes some significant contributions to
the field by changing the nature of the discussion about animal
traders in Africa in the 1920s and 1930s, and by enriching our
understanding of labor relations in the zoo, particularly in the
1970s. Both are important additions to zoo history. -- Jesse C.
Donahue * American Historical Review *
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