and the coeditor of Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History and They Are Dead and Yet They Live: Civil War Memories in a Polarized America, which is forthcoming in February 2026.
Kinder applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, World War Zoos: Humans and Other Animals in the Deadliest Conflict of the Deadliest Age, and reported the following:
Readers who parachute into page 99 will find themselves in the middle of the action. It’s May 1940. Poland is a smoking ruin. Day after day, Göring’s Luftwaffe is pounding Dutch cities. The fall of France is but a month away. And, as always, zoos are caught in the crossfire: proverbial sitting ducks with no way to run and nowhere to hide.Learn more about World War Zoos at the University of Chicago Press website.
I like this page quite a bit. It’s descriptive, it has a certain narrative punch, it balances detail and scope—characteristics, I like to think, of the entire book. Plus, in a few short paragraphs, page 99 touches on some of the big themes of World War Zoos. One is that the fate of wartime zoos was random. Few were surprised when zoos located near strategic military targets were destroyed by falling bombs. Beyond that, though, it was hard to predict which zoos would make it and which ones would wind up as collateral damage. The Rotterdam Zoo, discussed on the previous page, was hit hard by German incendiaries. Fire tore through the workshops and set the monkey house aflame. Two juvenile lions asphyxiated in their shelters. It was a living nightmare. Amsterdam’s Artis Zoo, by contrast, pretty much escaped the initial German invasion without a scratch. The difference was luck, happenstance. One zoo was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Page 99 also alludes to wartime zoos’ practice of killing their own animals in anticipation of future hardship. In this case, we see how Artis resisted—well, mostly resisted—calls to slaughter its “dangerous” animals in the early days of the invasion. (The zoo ultimately destroyed four venomous snakes.) Elsewhere in the book, however, I show how many zoos felt the need to kill their darlings. The rationales varied. Some zoos fretted about animal escapes; others sought to avoid sentencing animals to long painful deaths by starvation; still others determined that certain animals were worth more dead than alive. (This way their corpses could be fed to more, shall we say, “charismatic” zoo residents.)
Yet page 99 is not entirely a downer. It introduces ornithologist Jean Théodor Delacour, the world-famous birdman of Clères, site of one of the largest private bird parks in Europe. Delacour pops up at various points in the ensuring narrative. (After escaping occupied France, he spends the war years at the Bronx Zoo.) More important, this page hints at stories of empathy and courage that run throughout the book. For sure, World War Zoos shows human nature at its worst. Again and again, however, we encounter scenes of people risking their lives to save zoo animals and other precarious populations.
Unfortunately, page 99 doesn’t foreground what I consider the two most important questions of the book: Why should we care about zoos in World War II? And what can they teach us about how zoos might address twenty-first century crises? The answers to both questions are complex—far too complex for any single page to unpack—and I tackle them head-on elsewhere. Nevertheless, these two questions are, ultimately, why I think World War Zoos is so relevant. At the end of the day, I see this as a book about how we treat the most vulnerable among us, especially in difficult times. If that’s not a topic worth caring about (both in the past and in the present), I don’t know what is.
Writers Read: John M. Kinder (April 2015).
The Page 99 Test: Paying with Their Bodies.
--Marshal Zeringue
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