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Spotte reaches back to the artificial world of the last kings of France for a reference to what zoos are in danger of becoming in today's American postmodern culture: "a modernist collocation with the seventeenth century menagerie at Versailles, a place where spectators gawk at beautiful and rare creatures, any debate over an epistemic link with Nature having been long forgotten." This is quite a turn for zoos, which were established to acquaint moderns with wildlife and its habitats and offer sites for the study and protection of wildlife by zoologists and other specialists to expand the public's appreciation of it and the understanding of the ecology of nature all life was involved in. But even zoos have become subject to the technological, largely media, forces and epistemological changes rendering virtually everything imagery and spectacle as recognized by the likes of McLuhan and Baudrillard. The only way to comprehend the zoos and other man-made animal habitats such as aquariums which continue to be a part of cities and towns is by semiotics, not the naturalism and idealism which were their founding motivations. For a zoo or aquarium to become a part of postmodern culture like its myriad other aspects "would involve forcing it into a configuration similar to film, narrative fiction, or art, and were that to happen captive animals might then become expendable, replaced by images or simulacrums," thus making wildlife and more broadly nature even more remote and seemingly redundant. The author has no answer for this dilemma of zoos, which he sees as modernist projects out of tune with the mentality and values of postmodernism. What he offers is mostly a cautionary note in the hope of keeping the zoos and their animals from drifting into a more precarious circumstance. Spotte is a prolific author who is a former curator or director at top U.S. aquariums. He writes from a concern for such places with respect to both the well-being of their animals and their value to society. But the work on this unexpected subject of zoos and such is also a unique work of cultural studies, and especially illuminating for this.