Just stumbled across the author of this book on Twitter. This book, due to be released in February 2018, looks at the history of the man-animal relationship through the history of Bristol Zoo https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wild-Withi...id=1513694536&sr=8-2&keywords=the+wild+within The Wild Within
Whilst most new zoo books are welcome (to some extent or other) from the description this sounds a little too much like the recent Through The Lion Gate (on Berlin) for my tastes -though I'd love to be proved wrong.
I think this is the chap who spoke at Zoohistorica when it was in Bristol, a few years ago. What struck me, listening to him speak, was that despite his undoubted academic credentials, there wasn’t a passionate interest in the zoo itself - rather, in what it stood for (or could be said to stand for). This sentence, from the blurb, doesn’t fill me with optimism: “The multifaceted beasts and protean people in The Wild Within challenge a host of assumptions--both within and outside the zoo--about what it means to be human or animal in the modern world.” Given that there is already an excellent chronicle of Bristol’s history available, this new tome may not be an essential read.
For a given value of the word "available" given the fact that the excellent Illustrated History of Bristol Zoo Gardens has been out of print for some time and is pretty damn pricey when it pops up on the second-hand market.
This looks to me like some sort of anthropological-type study of historic animal/human relations within a Zoo and just happening to be using Bristol Zoo as the model.
