{"id":3866,"date":"2012-02-08T02:39:45","date_gmt":"2012-02-08T07:39:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spritewrites.net\/?p=3866"},"modified":"2012-02-08T02:39:45","modified_gmt":"2012-02-08T07:39:45","slug":"into-the-stacks-we-bought-a-zoo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spritewrites.net\/?p=3866","title":{"rendered":"into the stacks: we bought a zoo"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the 200 Wild Animals That Change Their Lives Forever<\/em> by Benjamin Mee<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>From the jacket:<\/strong> &#8220;In the market for a house and the adventure of a lifetime, Benjamin Mee decided to uproot his family and move them to an unlikely new home: a dilapidated zoo in the English countryside, complete with over 200 exotic animals. Mee, who specializes in animal behavior, had a dream to refurbish the zoo and run it as a family business. Naturally, friends and colleagues thought he was crazy.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>My take:<\/strong> It sounds like an ideal story, doesn&#8217;t it? An English guy, family in tow, buys a rundown private zoo with the intent of restoring it to its former glory and turning it into a reseeding ground for endangered animals. Add in family drama, personnel issues, escaped deadly creatures, a health crisis, and two small children and it&#8217;s what movie dreams are made of. Which may be why you recognize the title of the memoir I read last month &#8212; it was a movie that came out at the end of last year.<\/p>\n<p>The book, which the film&#8217;s release brought back to my mind, has a lot of potential. There&#8217;s a lot of good material in it &#8212; from Ben&#8217;s start in the French countryside, where he and his wife Katherine are raising their two young kids &#8212; all the way through the Mee family buying a dilapidated zoo from an eccentric old British man in Dartmoor and renovating it. You learn a lot about a lot of different things &#8212; from cutting edge cancer research to what an ordeal it is to secure loans and financing to bring such a business back from ruin. You get glimpses of the journalist Mee must have been before he gave up freelancing for a little piece of Dartmoor and several tigers.<\/p>\n<p>But the book is weighed down by inadequate editing. Characters are sometimes reintroduced within pages, while others reappear after hundreds of pages away with nary a reminder about their purpose in the story. There&#8217;s a lack of focus, as one might expect in a sprawling family drama that involves a tapir and peacocks, but it&#8217;s nothing I feel like a good red pen from a bit of distance might not have been able to fix.<\/p>\n<p>So, I guess I&#8217;d say if you think the subject matter interests you, it&#8217;s worth seeking the book out. But I didn&#8217;t connect with it in the way I expected to.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Pages:<\/strong> 261<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the 200 Wild Animals That Change Their Lives Forever by Benjamin Mee From the jacket: &#8220;In the market for a house and the adventure of a lifetime, Benjamin Mee decided to uproot his family and move them to an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>into the stacks: we bought a zoo - sprite writes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.spritewrites.net\/?p=3866\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"into the stacks: we bought a zoo - 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