215 museum and society, 8(3) museum and society, Nov 2010. 8(3) 215-221  2010, Thad Parsons, Shelley Ruth Butler, Robin Ostow, Jessica Zimmer. ISSN 1479-8360 Book Reviews Pascal Blanchard, , Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Éric Deroo and Sandrine Lemaire (eds), Teresa Bridgeman (trans.), Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008, paperback £19.95, pp. X+445 The study of ‘freak shows’ encompasses several fields of interest, from museum history to disability studies, and has developed an extensive English-language canon, centered on the works of individuals like Robert Bogdan and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, both of whom contributed to this collection. Based on the French volume, Zoos Humains, this edition brings together a range of divergent methodologies from history, sociology, and anthropology to examine ‘human zoos’, which represent an important combination of exhibition, performance, education, and colonial domination. While examining these displays’ prehistory and legacy, the volume’s authors focus on the heyday of anthropo-zoological exhibitions during the 19th and early-20th centuries in America and Western Europe to attempt to show the lasting impacts of these inherently ephemeral events. Across the volume’s thirty chapters, a detailed examination of the variety of ‘human zoos’ - loosely defined as placing a human on display because of what they are (any real or imagined difference) and not because of what they do (an artisan or musician, for example) - reveals the interrelationship between epistemology, ideology, and cultural form these displays embodied. Understanding these relationships highlights the impact this phenomenon had on the discourse of science, the collective image of the self versus the Other, and the motivations of the full range of actors. Furthermore, the focus on particular sites and events throughout the volume permits one to comprehend the means of popularization and how these views could be perpetuated through secondary cultural forms. Overall, this volume, and the larger project that underpins it, seeks to expose the colonial history of the postcolonial present. The book is divided into three sections. Part 1 presents the historical and definitional positions that underlie the study of human zoos. Garland-Thomson’s From Wonder to Error: Monsters from Antiquity to Modernity (Ch. 1) provides a compelling introduction to the history of the ‘freak show’ and sets the tone for the chapters that follow it. These include pieces on displays like the Hottentot Venus (Ch. 2), organizers like P.T. Barnum (Ch. 3), and locales like the Jardin d’Acclimatation (Ch. 8). Part 2 investigates the people involved, their motives, and their reception. From American Indians (Ch. 10 & 17) to Niam-Niams - the ‘tailed people’ (Ch. 19), most of the section focuses on those being displayed and the circumstances concerning their display, including questions concerning their freedom and the truth of their presentation. However, the wider populations involved with ‘human zoos’ are not neglected: Peacock’s Africa Meets the Great Farini (Ch. 15) is an impressive examination of the motivations and life of an exhibitor, and Edwards’s Photography and the Making of the Other (Ch. 20) tries to show how the reproduction and dissemination of images affected the perception of the Other within the larger visual economy. Part 3 focuses on context. The twelve authors in this section examine the effect that the differing social or political national contexts had on the focus, style, and content of human zoos in their country of choice. Including studies of Japan (Ch. 21), Belgium (Ch. 23), Italy (Ch. 29), and Spain (Ch. 30), this section expands the context for human zoos beyond the main four counties - the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany - discussed most frequently throughout the volume. Additionally, this section contains the one chapter that is the biggest stretch of the volume’s coverage but is the most noteworthy for modern museum historians, Arnoldi’s From the Diorama to the Dialogic: A Century of Exhibiting