"We Bought a Zoo" is a memoir about how Benjamin Mee and his family were able to purchase a zoo and its 200 wild animals in 2006.

We might have studied animals, we might love animals. We might hate zoos, we might love them. But who can actually claim to own one? Benjamin Mee.

Through chance, the steadfast "look-the-other-way" support of his family and a long line of credit applications, Mee and his family became the owners of Dartmoor Wildlife Park, its 200 wild animals and their decrepit homes in October 2006.

Their story is told in Benjamin Mee's memoir, "We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the 200 Wild Animals That Change Their Lives Forever" (Weinstein Books, 261 pages, $24.95).

Two years earlier, Mee, a newspaper columnist and his wife, Katherine, escaped from London with their two young children and bought two old stone barns in the heart of Southern France. Paradise.

But, when Mee's sister sent him a listing for a zoo in Devon, England, his gears began to turn.

As a student of animal behavior, Mee was only marginally more qualified for the job of zookeeper that the average person. But as a conservationist, he saw the potential in the zoo immediately: to live with, educate the public about, and help create a better world for the animals was something that he, and amazingly his 76-year-old mother, couldn't pass up.

The goals of the zoo were clear — keep the dedicated original staff, improve the conditions, bring it up to code, reopen, educate visitors and somehow find the money to keep it going. What wasn't clear was what and who would cause the bumps along the way. It was these impending snags that contribute to much of the drama in the book.

It would be both impossible and tedious to include all the details, so Mee's story has a bit of a whirlwind feel to it. We are given the surface but nothing much deeper. Going deeper is the job of a good memoir. This one doesn't quite get there.

What a great story though — definitely the stuff of dreams.