David Grazian used to spend a lot of time in blues clubs in Chicago and in the entertainment districts of Philadelphia. For the early part of the Penn sociology professor’s career, his research was devoted to nightlife in cities.

When his first son was born in 2006, Grazian realized his late nights studying people and their surroundings at bars, clubs, and music venues had to end.

“I still hoisted a bottle at 2:30 in the morning, but it was a bottle of formula and not beer,” he says. “While my career as a nocturnal ethnographer was over, I found myself taking my son to the zoo almost every weekend.”

The Philadelphia Zoo was convenient for his family, Grazian explains—just a 15-minute drive from his home at the time. Plus, his son loved the animals.

“The zoo is a very family-friendly place,” Grazian says. “Kids really like animals. Zoos go out of their way to pitch entertainment to the younger set; there’s face-painting, there’s 3D movies, there’s carousels, and train rides.”

It didn’t take long for Grazian to start making connections between the zoo and, well, cocktail lounges.

“And not just because they both are great places to watch uninhibited mating rituals,” Grazian jokes. “They both attempt to manufacture authenticity by relying on highly produced stage sets that audiences nevertheless invest with meaning and sentiment.”

That’s when Grazian thought to begin his newest journey. He calls the latest telling of his research a “sociological safari.” As he explains in his recently released book “American Zoo,” he traded in his tweed jacket for a zoo uniform and got his hands dirty—literally—by volunteering for a total of four years, about 600 hours, at two urban zoos.

“I knew that zoos have this front stage and this back stage, and I knew that working at the zoo was the only way I was going to get backstage,” Grazian says.

At one institution, which he calls “City Zoo,” he worked in an outdoor children’s zoo, cleaning enclosures and exhibits, preparing and distributing food for small animals, and managing children in petting yards filled with goats and sheep. At the second zoo, dubbed “Metro Zoo,” he worked as a docent. He handled and presented small live animals, such as Arizona desert king snakes, ball pythons, chinchillas, fat-tailed geckos, and screech owls, to zoo audiences of all ages. He also prepared meals for most of the animals of the zoo’s collection—giraffes, jaguars, cougars, river otters, Jamaican fruit bats, and more.

For secondary research, he traveled to 26 zoos and aquariums throughout the country. His fieldwork companion? His son Scott, whose age spanned from 3 to 7 years during the course of the research. Together, they took backstage tours and conducted extended periods of public observation at selected exhibits and animal shows.

Grazian tells his adventurous journey through eight chapters in “American Zoo.” He discusses the importance, but also difficulties, of creating an authentic-looking, naturalistic zoo environment; the different reasons people attend zoos and the varied responses they have to the experience; the drudging, dirty, but also pleasurable work of the zookeepers; the zoo educators whose entire lives—inside and outside the zoo’s quarters—revolve around the need to share their expertise; how visitors often desire to be amused by the zoo animals rather than educated; the way zoos have become institutional pillars of international conservation, habitat preservation, ecological research, and environmental awareness; the perspectives of animal rights and animal welfare advocates surrounding issues of animal captivity; and the complex past and expected future of zoos.

“One of the things I learned over the course of my research is how the entire zoo experience is produced for audience members,” Grazian says.

As someone who has always found zoos intriguing, Grazian says he went into this research with an open mind.

“I wasn’t particularly interested in either skewering or celebrating zoos,” he says. “Rather, I thought they were fascinating places and I wanted to learn how they worked. I was as interested in figuring out why zoos were beloved by so many people as I was in understanding why zoos bothered so many others.”

Grazian says his book’s intended audience includes “smart people of all ages,” especially college students.

“I try to make my books jargon-free,” he says. “I’ve always felt that since the kind of books that I write tend to cover popular topics, they offer a strategic opportunity to educate the public about sociology in a way that is fun and engaging, but still intellectually serious.”