Book Review: The Jackdaw by Achilles Cools

 

 Note: The title of this book has been translated into English by me for the reading comprehension of this blog's viewers as the book itself isn't available in English (yet). The original title reads De kauw.

This is the second book in this bird non-fiction series I'm reading. I hope this one is a bit better than The Raven, because that one wasn't a joy to read. 

In this book, Cools tells us everything there is to know about jackdaws, such as their behavior, what they eat, how they reproduce, how to recognize one, etc. He also delves into a project with a lot of captive jackdaws he was involved in.

Despite this book being written by a different author than the book about ravens from the same series I read previously, I still feel a bit the same about this book. The information presented is good and valuable on surface value, and the author clearly knows what he's talking about, but the dry and stale writing voice sucks out pretty much all the passion this book is trying to bring across. 

Maybe the authors participating in this bird-centric book series are just supposed to write dryly and in thgis very matter-of-fact way? Because it's the second book in this series I've read that's written like this and it makes reading them not a joy, to say the least. I originally wanted to check out more books about different books from this series, but on second thought I might not because both this book and The Raven by Louis Beyens just feel like a chore to get through due to the very stale writing voice.

That said, I still do absolutely applaud the author for all his knowledge about jackdaws and this book definitely did teach me a thing or two about them. It just wasn't a joy to read and I felt no passion from the author. Honestly, the best chapters aren't the ones where Cools is telling us facts about the jackdaws, but instead is recounting events of the captive jackdaws he worked with for his project. Those were fun and interesting anecdotes and the only part of the book that really had me hooked. There the passion of the author came across very well. The other, more informative chapters, not so much.

So overall not a bad book, I just can't get into the author's writing voice, much like Louis Beyens' The Raven. I'm probably not going to pick up another book from this series.

3/5