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"On a night train from Nice to Berlin in 1928, two men sat mesmerized by the companion who shared their compartment" (1). With this, a line that seems crafted more toward a work of historical fiction than a sober history of a significant cultural institution of the German capital, Gary Bruce begins his fast-paced and fascinating account of the history of the Berlin Zoo from its beginnings to today. Within a few more sentences, we discover that the "companion" was a three-year-old gorilla who would become famous as "Bobby," one in a series of celebrities exhibited at the zoo, including the elephant "Rostom," the hippopotamus "Knautschke," the polar bear "Knut," and a group of Greenland Inuit, who provide milestones in this historical journey. Bruce, who has previously written about the Stasi (The Firm, 2010), follows the reception of these personalities and also tells a broader institutional and cultural history by structuring his account around both the changing leadership of the zoo and larger historical developments in Berlin and Germany. Bruce's central contention is that a history of the Berlin Zoo can also be a history of modern Germany; that the visions of the institution's...