A resonant true story of small-town politics and community perseverance and of decent people and questionable choices, Zoo Nebraska is a timely requiem for a rural America in the throes of extinction.Royal, Nebraska, population eighty-one–where the church, high school, and post office each stand abandoned, monuments to a Great Plains town that never flourished. But for nearly twenty years, they … twenty years, they had a zoo, seven acres that rose from local peculiarity to key tourist attraction to devastating tragedy. And it all began with one man’s outsize vision.
When Dick Haskin’s plans to assist primatologist Dian Fossey in Rwanda were cut short by her murder, Dick’s devotion to primates didn’t die with her. He returned to his hometown with Reuben, an adolescent chimp, in the bed of a pickup truck and transformed a trailer home into the Midwest Primate Center. As the tourist trade multiplied, so did the inhabitants of what would become Zoo Nebraska, the unlikeliest boon to Royal’s economy in generations and, eventually, the source of a power struggle that would lead to the tragic implosion of Dick Haskin’s dream.
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The demise of a zoo and the poorly handled management. A downer all the way!
Zoo Nebraska is the kind of delightfully unexpected book that comes along once in a blue moon. The subject, the bittersweet and hilarious collapse of a once-charming zoo in a once-charming Midwest town, is as unlikely as it is wonderful. The chimpanzees run wild, and away we go. Carson Vaughan writes with eloquent meticulousness. He has a novelist’s eye. The overall impact is stunning.
Vaughan catapults into the sphere of my favorite writers by rooting out and unfurling this nearly lost but epic story of an American back road. This book howls to life and delivers a tale of people and critters like none I’ve ever heard. I was instantly lost in the fascinating story of an eccentric achievement and its violent, then slow grind into obsolescence. A brilliant writer and researcher, Vaughan dazzles when he turns all his talents to his home state, which in his hands, is flyover country no more.
From the very first sentences, this story grips you with such rich detail and passion for place and character that you won’t be able to put it down. Writing in the tradition of investigative work such as Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, Carson Vaughan explores the tale of a small zoo in Royal, Nebraska, and the well-intentioned people whose untenable dreams are lost at great expense to the lives around them. Beginning with the calls to police, the story brings us into obsessions that drive the human heart beyond the boundaries of reason, leading to the inevitable tragedy that follows. This is a book not only for animal lovers but also for readers who want to experience the many corners of worlds we build through sheer will and imagination, the kind of private dreaming that is a hallmark of our culture.
Zoo Nebraska is Great Plains Gothic, Fargo meets S-Town meets Alexander Payne, a riveting tale of quixotic hopes and dreams and bad blood, all of it carefully, knowingly, sympathetically told.
This wild, beautiful book is so inventive and genuine, full of insight into life on this earth and particularly in the teeming microcosm of Zoo Nebraska. Who could guess that what happened here could so thoroughly and strangely explain our times?
A marvelous, meaningful book, full of deep reporting, fine writing, and big questions about the nature of community, of living with animals, of challenging values. Zoo Nebraska will surprise and engage you and make you think.
In Zoo Nebraska, Carson Vaughan traces the beauty and terror of one man’s dream to create a haven for exotic animals amid the fossil beds and farmland of rural Nebraska. What follows is an epic of small-town America, an all-too-human story where the dreams of men run wild of their aims and unlikely beasts break loose on city streets. Like Cather, Vaughan has an eye for the grace and folly of the pioneer heart against the vast, stern beauty of the American plains.
Here is a real-life small-town drama, literary journalism that reads like a novel — heartbreak, dreams, bad luck, loss on a ‘local level,’ where pain can be seen and heard. It’s also sometimes very funny. Zoo Nebraska resides in the bull’s-eye of good literature: it’s about heart, soul, and grit — all made tactile. Vaughan, just out of the chute with his first book, has hit his stride already. This book will keep you up way past bedtime — reading to find out what could possibly come next, and next, and finally next. And if you were lucky enough to be raised in a small town, you will ever so clearly recognize lives, events, hopes, and fears that are so eloquently opened to you.
In the finest John McPhee tradition, Carson Vaughan has picked his spot on the map; described its surface in careful, evocative detail; and then drilled deep, revealing the dreams, ambitions, frustrations, and failures of the citizens of Royal, Nebraska, who hoped to put their town on the map by opening a zoo. The product of meticulous research and reporting, Zoo Nebraska has a narrative drive and a collection of complex characters that few books, fiction or nonfiction, can match. It’s a remarkable achievement.
Dick Haskin’s dream of starting a primate research center in his tiny hometown in Nebraska is the kind of crazy notion that would be easy to mock or deride, especially when everything spins absurdly and tragically out of control. But Carson Vaughan recognizes something deeper. With Willa Cather’s eye for the countryside and the Coen brothers’ ear for dialogue, Vaughan reveals Haskin’s story for what it really is: a strange, ineffable, and heartbreaking emblem of what it means to live in — and feel circumscribed by — the narrow bounds of a dying town. This amazing book of good intentions and bad outcomes reminds us that no place is too small for big ideas or devastating consequences.
If there were such a thing as a dream anthropologist, you’d find Carson Vaughan at the top of the profession, helping us understand how some dreams become traps — become cages — and how sometimes when a dream dies, it kills everything around it. I truly feel that Vaughan’s chronicle of Royal, Nebraska, and its heartbreaking zoo is an Americana masterpiece.
I recommend this book!
I’ll start this review with a reference given at the end of the book. In the Acknowledgements section to be exact. Author Carson Vaughan was with his future wife traveling along the small town backroads of her youth when she casually pointed out a spot off the highway and said: “that’s where Reuben was shot.” Having written two books myself, I know that inspiration can come from unexpected sources. Learning that Reuben was a chimpanzee sparked Carson’s interest. What started out as a college thesis project morphed into a narrative nonfiction manuscript some ten-plus years in the making.
Carson Vaughan was right about his initial hunch. The story of Reuben and the events leading to his death is a compelling slice-of-life tale. The manic events surrounding Reuben’s death are given in great detail in the final chapters of the book. Everything that precedes that event makes up the lion’s share of the story. How is it that a chimpanzee ended up as the star attraction of a second-rate zoo in Nebraska? Who are the people behind these road-side zoos? What is like trying to run a zoo with limited funds? These are some of the questions covered in Zoo Nebraska.
The genesis of Zoo Nebraska starts with Dick Haskin, who brought Reuben to Nebraska and the bed of his pickup truck. Dick was set on a course of primatology research. His plans were cut short when Dian Fossey, who Dick was slated to assist in Rwanda, was murdered. Dick had no intentions of starting a Zoo. In fact, he despised zoos. But Dick wasn’t the best at turning his interests into income. When he saw an opportunity to charge admission for others to view Reuben, Zoo Nebraska was born.
Despite Dick Haskin’s good intentions, Reuben lived a life of isolation and confinement. Dick had plans for a large enclosure where Reuben and companion chimps could live a more natural life, but Dick didn’t have the funds to build such an enclosure. His attempts at finding other chimpanzees to join Reuben came up short. Dick barely had funds to feed himself. But Dick had a dream and he made strides towards fulfilling that dream one day at a time.
Read the full review at https://everythingnonfiction.com/review-of-zoo-nebraska/
Having lived in Omaha and visited the Henry Doorly Zoo with my chldren many times, this tiny zoo story intrigued me. However, minutia took over. The story was initially interesting and sad (lack of funds, lack of concern, untrained and unconcerned employees, and lonely animals). and I got it. Then it stopped being really interesting and dragged me into the details for many pages. I think it is a worthwhile book, but I could have appreciated the sad story in fewer than 242 pages of small print. Kudos to Carson Vaughan for being so very thorough. He truly tried to represent the total story, and it left me sad for the animals, sad for the townspeople, sad for the loss of a zoo. I might recommend this book to an animal lover who is also a very fast reader. I am, but it tired me as I waited for some reprieve and powers to wake up and help the trapped animals.
Shirley R. Harris – English teacher/good reader/ animal lover.
Fascinating piece of Nebraska history