H Is for Hawk
4.5/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year
One of Slate's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Last 25 Years
ON MORE THAN 25 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR LISTS: including TIME (#1 Nonfiction Book), NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine (10 Favorite Books), Vogue (Top 10), Vanity Fair, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle (Top 10), Miami Herald, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Minneapolis Star Tribune (Top 10), Library Journal (Top 10), Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Slate, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, Amazon (Top 20)
The instant New York Times bestseller and award-winning sensation, Helen Macdonald's story of adopting and raising one of nature's most vicious predators has soared into the hearts of millions of readers worldwide. Fierce and feral, her goshawk Mabel's temperament mirrors Helen's own state of grief after her father's death, and together raptor and human "discover the pain and beauty of being alive" (People). H Is for Hawk is a genre-defying debut from one of our most unique and transcendent voices.
Editor's Note
Beauty and grief…
Helen Macdonald’s genre-defying book became an instant classic upon its release. An attentive rumination on everything from raising birds to dealing with grief, it’s a transcendent examination of what it really means to live.
Helen Macdonald
Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator and naturalist, and an affiliated research scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of the bestselling H is for Hawk, as well as a cultural history of falcons, titled Falcon, and three collections of poetry, including Shaler’s Fish. Macdonald was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, has worked as a professional falconer, and has assisted with the management of raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia. She now writes for the New York Times Magazine.
Read more from Helen Macdonald
Prophet Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5H Is for Hawk Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Vesper Flights Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Rage for Falcons: An Alliance Between Man and Bird Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shaler's Fish: Poems Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Vesper Flights Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMr. Blue Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to H Is for Hawk
Related ebooks
Cider with Rosie: A Memoir Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVirga & Bone: Essays from Dry Places Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Meadow Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Catch a Mole: Wisdom from a Life Lived in Nature Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Ghost in the Throat Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Brother of the More Famous Jack: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Family and Other Animals Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Desert Solitaire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Deep Hanging Out: Wanderings and Wonderment in Native California Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stone Desert Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLives Other Than My Own: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Living: Novel, A Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Irons in the Fire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Book of Migrations Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Corfu Trilogy: My Family and Other Animals; Birds, Beasts and Relatives; and The Garden of the Gods Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Chronology of Water: A Memoir Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5West with the Night (Warbler Classics) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOn Animals Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In Search of Small Gods Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Seed to Dust: Life, Nature, and a Country Garden Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Women's Biographies For You
Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Finding Me: An Oprah's Book Club Pick Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Frida Kahlo: An Illustrated Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wuthering Heights Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ordeal Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everything I Know About Love: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Geisha: A Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Afeni Shakur: Evolution Of A Revolutionary Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Butts: A Backstory Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rememberings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Glass Castle: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sex Cult Nun: Breaking Away from the Children of God, a Wild, Radical Religious Cult Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unveiled: How the West Empowers Radical Muslims Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Stash: My Life in Hiding Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Babysitter: My Summers with a Serial Killer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Yes Please Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for H Is for Hawk
21 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This story on Ms. Macdonald’s brought me back to a time in my childhood, roaming about fields, forest, and river with no one around for miles, to the magical places she mentioned. Only on another continent. It was a salve for the distance between now and when my father died and the memories he left for me. Those I’ve been able to decipher properly and those still an enigma.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5"Hunting with a hawk took me to the very edge of being a human, then it took me past that place to somewhere I wasn't human at all."
A five star read to start the year: the writing is beautiful, the emotions true, the thoughts deep. Having recently lost my own father I understood her words of grief, but this is not a sad story. MacDonald's is a tale of her singular way of dealing with grief - falconry.
"The cure for loneliness is solitude."
Returning to nature is common after loss. As a child she bird watched with her father and felt an almost religious awe when looking at raptors. Her teacher told the class no one knew why ancient people worshipped them. MacDonalds response:
"I was indignant, I knew exactly why, but at that age was at a loss to put my intuition into words that made sense even to me."
Little Helen MacDonald read T.H. White's The Goshawk. She read many animal books as a child, The Red Pony, Old Yeller, Charlottes Web, but in all of these the animals die. Gos did not and she clung to that hard. It left such an impression that MacDonald chose the same bird and devoted half of her book to White's life and how it affected his goshawk.
Her goshawk consumes her life. All her time and decisions center around it. To train the raptor she dulls her humanity and welcomes that yellow eyed otherness, a state of extreme awareness and feeling that has nothing to do with her loss.
"Instantly I feel that terrible blow, it is a killing blow but there is something about the force of it that reminds me that I am alive."
"The world with a hawk in it was insulated from harm and in that world I was exactly aware of all the edges of my skin."
Understanding her love of the goshawk a peculiar one she discovers that many animal writers, like White, were gay, expressing their socially unacceptable love through a medium. As White was also a sadist trying not to be a sadist this was a little hard to read, such people should never have pets.
I thought the most interesting part was her observation that the historical relationship/portrayal of goshawks to men mirrored that of women to men.
MacDonald used the hawk to escape but it's eventually what brings her back to people, both in terms of the falconry community and the many people who stopped to talk to the lady with the hawk, as I would have.
"I'm begging to see that for some people a hawk on the hand of a stranger urges confession, urges confidences, lets you speak words about hope, and home, and heart."
I don't think I'm doing this book justice with my review. The writing takes you along, sometimes it feels a shade beyond lucid, to the world of an English professor, a hawk, of everything as text and context. There's not a point to this book but it's not pointless.
"Hands are for other human hands to hold they should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks."1 person found this helpful