Book Review: Captivated by Animals by Casper Janssen

 

  Note: This book isn't available in English (yet). The original title reads In de ban van het beest.

Another Dutch nature non-fiction, why not?

In this book, the author has selected quite a few animals from Dutch nature and dedicated a brief chapter to every one of them. In each chapter the author has interviewed an expert on the animal in question, and the expert tells a little bit about the critter and their experiences working with them or studying them. Each chapter is also accompanied by a photo.

Overall this was a pretty fun read and it is clear just from how each expert talks about each species how passionate they are about it. Whether it's about animals we typically consider cute (otters) or cool (birds of prey), or the more underappreciated (certain spiders and bugs, geese, fish, etc.). Every animal is given about an equal amount of spotlight and it's just really neat to see how passionate each expert is about each of the critters. They don't always have to be large, threatening or cute to be greatly appreciated by someone.

I guess that if I had to have a minor gripe, it's that in the chapter dedicated to roe deer the expert interviewed in question dismisses comparisons between the fictional character of Bambi and the roe deer species because (and I quote): "Walt Disney's Bambi is a white-tailed deer". Which just shows that the expert at least didn't do their research into Bambi as a character, because guess what, the original Bambi from the book the movie is based on is explicitly a roe deer. 

Felix Salten's novel takes place in Europe (probably Germany or Austria) and Bambi is a roe deer in it, later Disney's movie adaptation (and even some translations of the original book) would change Bambi's species, but the real, original Bambi is most certainly a roe deer. Which is something you'd expect a true roe deer expert to know. Bambi is probably still the most famous fictional roe deer out there, even if a lot of people are probably more familiar with his Walt Disney counterpart. 

Another gripe I have that other reviewers I have brought up that doesn't really make the quality of the book suffer but is still worth mentioning: pretty much all the experts interviewed here are men. Which is just, come on, man. It's the 21st century, it can't be that had to find more women in this field of work to interview. And that's not even mentioning non-binary identities. Just feels very last-century to only mainly interview men. Again, the book isn't any worse for it and the people interviewed do clearly know their stuff, but it really wouldn't hurt to make this book less of a sausage-fest. Or heck, you could even make a sequel where mostly women are interviewed as a followup. This book is quite expansive, but it still only covers around sixty or so species, and it's well known that the Netherlands has a lot more to offer. So while I wouldn't want the author to go back and retroactively add more diversity in experts to this book (it's fine as is, just not very diverse), a followup with more women (and god forbid, other genders) featured would be a step in the right direction.

While not my favorite Dutch nature non-fiction I've read, it's still definitely good. The chapters are easy to get through and this is also a good book to have on hand if you have to travel and want to read a short chapter once every while. 

Rating: 4/5