Bousé, who holds a doctorate from the Annenberg School for Communication at U. Penn, argues that wildlife films and videos are underrated as creative objects and overestimated as pedagogical tools. Wildlife filming, he also points out, owes its attempts to stir emotion to Hollywood; and, as others have noticed, representations of animal interactions often tell more about people than about animals (including the pressures that a ratings-driven industry imposes on filmmakers to follow established conventions). Bousé surveys the history of the wildlife genre, from its 19th-century origins to today's "animal soaps" and IMAX productions, and in so doing fills a gap in the fields of "green cultural studies" and media studies. The book contains a valuable chronology of highlights from the history of wildlife and natural history films.