"The last Palestinian zoo stands on a dead-end street in the once prosperous farming town of Qalqilya, on the very edge of the West Bank. Most of Qalqilya's residents cannot leave; few visitors are able to enter. The zoo, founded in 1986 with help from Israeli zoologists, vets, and wildlife workers, was barely a year old when the first Palestinian intifada erupted. It struggled on through the next decade as violence surged and abated throughout the region, and then as the second, "Al-Aqsa," intifada in 2000 saw the town paralyzed by curfews, arrests, and military roadblocks. Unlike the wartime zoos of Kabul, Baghdad, and Sarajevo, Qalqilya Zoo endured the height of its crisis without help from outside." "Today, the zoo's iron bars are rusting. Peacocks wander quiet avenues shaded by broad plane trees; a teenage baboon broods in solitary confinement; walls bear the pockmarks of gunfire. And yet it is an extraordinary place, with a strange, troubling, and inspiring tale to tell.

At the center of this story in Dr. Sami Khader, the only zoo veterinarian in the Palestinian territories. Family man, amateur inventor, and dedicated taxidermist, he is fiercely independent, apolitical, and imaginative in times of crisis. Dr. Sami has a personal dream to transform the zoo into one of an international caliber, against all odds." "The Zoo on the Road to Nablus brings the reader into a world rarely glimpsed from the outside. At once comic, melancholy, and heartwarming, it weaves the true stories of the zoo's animals, its staff, and its visitors into a lush chronicle of the indomitability of the human - and animal - spirit."--BOOK JACKET.