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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Helen Macdonald is an English writer, naturalist and academic at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of H is for Hawk, which won the Samuel Johnson prize. This book is a depiction of the grief and depression she fell into after the sudden death of her father in 2007 and how she bounced back through falconry. H is for Hawk, which has just won the £20,000 prize, describes the year Macdonald spent training a goshawk. She writes about subsuming her grief in the relationship with the bird and trying to be like her: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life. Her book is the first memoir to win the prize. She will be at the WORD Christchurch Writers & Readers Festival in 2015.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this elegant synthesis of memoir and literary sleuthing, an English academic finds that training a young goshawk helps her through her grief over the death of her father. With her three-year fellowship at the University of Cambridge nearly over, Macdonald, a trained falconer, rediscovers a favorite book of her childhood, T.H. White's The Goshawk (1951), in which White, author of The Once and Future King, recounts his mostly failed but illuminating attempts at training a goshawk, one of the most magnificent and deadly raptors. Macdonald secures her own goshawk, which she names Mabel, and the fierce wildness of the young bird soothes her sense of being broken by her father's untimely death. The book moves from White's frustration at training his bird to Macdonald's sure, deliberate efforts to get Mabel to fly to her. She identifies so strongly with her goshawk that she feels at one with the creature. Macdonald writes, "I shared, too, [White's] desire to escape to the wild, a desire that can rip away all human softness and leave you stranded in a world of savage, courteous despair." The author plunges into the archaic terminology of falconry and examines its alleged gendered biases; she finds comfort in the "invisibility" of being the trainer, a role she undertook as a child obsessed with watching birds and animals in nature. Macdonald describes in beautiful, thoughtful prose how she comes to terms with death in new and startling ways as a result of her experiences with the goshawk. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Transfixed by books and birds of prey as a girl, Macdonald became a historian, writer, and professional falconer involved in avian research and conversation. She has long been haunted by The Goshawk (1951), an account of a disastrous attempt to train a member of that defiant species by T. H. White (1906-64), author of the Arthurian novels known collectively as The Once and Future King. When her beloved father, a well-known London photojournalist, died suddenly, Macdonald's grief was overwhelming. In the grip of it, she decided to try doing what White failed so wretchedly to accomplish, train a goshawk, and acquired a glorious young raptor she named Mabel. Macdonald's hectic and soaring experiences hunting with fierce yet playful Mabel force her to confront with new intensity the vast and wondrous mysteries of love and death. As Macdonald chronicles her intimate, all-consuming relationship with this magnificent predator of penetrating vision and air-slicing power, she also candidly charts her plunge into depression and sensitively tells the poignant story of White's lonely life as he tried to bond with a wild creature while struggling to accept his sexual orientation in a time of cruel intolerance. In this profoundly inquiring and wholly enrapturing memoir, Macdonald exquisitely and unforgettably entwines misery and astonishment, elegy and natural history, human and hawk.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IF BIRDS ARE MADE OF AIR, as the nature writer Sy Montgomery says, then writing a great bird book is a little like dusting for the fingerprints of a ghost. It calls for poetry and science, conjuring and evidence. In her breathtaking new book, "H Is for Hawk," winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book Award, Helen Macdonald renders an indelible impression of a raptor's fierce essence - and her own - with words that mimic feathers, so impossibly pretty we don't notice their astonishing engineering. The premise of her memoir is simple: Macdonald loses her bearings after her beloved father's sudden death. She retreats from the human world. She's a poet, historian and longtime falconer, and for complicated reasons, she seizes upon a strange yet sublime prescription for what ails her: She will raise and train a young goshawk, a cur of a bird to some, notoriously difficult to tame. Bigger, "bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier," she says, than other hawks they are sometimes confused with. Although "animal as emotional healer" is a familiar motif, Macdonald's journey clears its own path - messy, muddy and raw. Early on, she drives to Scotland from her home in Cambridge to pick up a captive-bred, 10-week-old, Czech-Finnish-German goshawk she's seen online. At the first glimpse of her bird, Macdonald's "heart jumps sideways." And so does the reader's, for here is a creature worth writing about: "A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water." Back home, the bird fills "the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent." Fatherless mourner and baby hawk become acquainted. Macdonald grew up obsessed with birds of prey and later trained them, so she knows what to do and has all the necessary equipment: the tiny leather hood, as beautifully made, an observer says, as a Prada shoe; the jesses, or tethering straps; bells; and transmitters. The freezer is a morgue for dead chicks used to train and feed the hawk. Except for using devices that require a power source, Macdonald handles her bird much as a 15th-century falconer would. The bird becomes Mabel, derived "from amabilis, meaning lovable, or dear," and she learns to fly to Macdonald's fist at the sound of a whistle: "There is a scratch of talons on wood, a flowering of feathers, one deep downstroke, the brief, heavy swing of talons brought up and into play and the dull thud as she hits my glove." There are tearful misunderstandings and glorious steps forward. But Macdonald's progress is not as steady as her hawk's. Training proceeds, but not without an existential hitch. "While the steps were familiar," Macdonald writes, "the person taking them was not. I was in ruins. Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief and numb to the hurts of human life." Looking back at her mad mourning, she realizes a painful transformation is taking place: "What the mind does after losing one's father isn't just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with." Macdonald feels safe in the dark house, barricaded from the outside world, but knows she must go out for Mabel's sake - to the woods, where the goshawk's "long, barred tail feathers and short, broad wings" are perfectly suited for the speed and hairpin-turning ability necessary for aerial slalom in dense forest. We get to know Mabel as her trainer does. Macdonald stays so close, and the house is so quiet when they are together that she can hear the bird blinking. The hawk's breath is like "pepper and musk and burned stone." Her preening sounds like a deck of cards being shuffled. Every mood can be read: Feathers held in tight is fear; when Mabel fluffs herself and shakes her feathers into place, she is content. We come to love the bird's "shaggy trousers and waggy tail," her "café au lait front streaked thickly with cocoa-colored teardrops," and even her formidable weapons - the "curved black beak" and the black talons. Soon enough, Macdonald doesn't even consciously inventory the body language of her bird; instead she seems to just feel what Mabel feels. On a hunch, Macdonald even discovers a little bit of whimsy in this ultra-serious predator. She rolls up paper into a ball and hands it to Mabel. The hawk plays with it like a toy, eyes narrowed in "bird laughter." That's not our image of hawks at all. And it's an important point to Macdonald, who worries, rightly, that generations of preconceived notions rob us of truly seeing some creatures as they really are. "Wild things are made from human histories," she writes. This handler is determined to see her own hawk for who she really is, and, of course, she comes to see herself more clearly too. The two go further and further afield, and through scrapes, wounds and mishaps, Macdonald sheds something, changes, becomes something new - but not what she might have intended. She thinks she's becoming a hawk herself. Her identity has shifted enough so that when she slips out of her hawking clothes and into street clothes for social events, she feels she's in disguise. Perhaps not so surprising for a woman who calls herself a "watcher," who grew up as an "invisible girl," who, like her father, a news photographer, felt more comfortable observing others than being seen. Her personal history, the history of falconry and historical and personal notions of identity and belonging surface as she aches for her lost father. She experiences vertigo and depression. She keeps denting her father's car, breaking dishes. Falconry with Mabel feels like an addiction, as dangerous as "if I'd taken a needle and shot myself with heroin." And yet the hawk also helps her to remember what happiness feels like. "There was nothing that was such a salve to my grieving heart as the hawk returning," she writes. She and the hawk are "parts of each other," incomplete when separated. Macdonald notes: "I remember thinking of the passage in 'The Sword in the Stone' where a falconer took a goshawk back onto his own fist, 'reassuming him like a lame man putting on his accustomed wooden leg, after it had been lost.'" Caring for Mabel revives Macdonald's interest in the author of the book, T.H. White. His memoir "The Goshawk" haunts her; she has a fascination, often reluctant and dark, with the writer and his inept, troubled and even cruel relationship with a goshawk he tried to tame. THERE IS a funny mingling of tame and wild in hawks. They can be bred and raised by humans, Macdonald points out, but they are not domesticated. I've brought a gloved fist underneath a trained hawk who was "mantling" a dead pigeon (covering it with his wings), and hissing at me with eyes blazing. It shocked me that he left the kill to hop on my novice's hand. And I've seen injured wild hawks being treated in veterinary clinics where the caregiver plunges a gloved hand into the cage and then pulls it out with a hawk on board. Imagine trying this with an injured tiger. But those wild hawks are every bit as predatory as any big cat. When Mabel is deliberately dropped to a lower weight, her desire to kill, something falconers call yarak, ratchets up. The hunting is brutal. And Macdonald and Mabel are co-conspirators. They look for prey together, work in tandem on the release, and even share the killing and its spoils. Mabel brings down pheasants and rabbits, and she merrily begins eating them before they're dead. Macdonald steps in then, breaking the necks of Mabel's catches to hasten the end. As the hawk becomes tamer, she says, she herself grows wilder. Maybe she's gone too far on her journey. "Hands are for other human hands to hold," she writes. "They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks." Her own hands, by now, are records, written in "thin white lines," of her months with Mabel, months of grief and healing. "One is from her talons when she'd been fractious with hunger; it feels like a warning made flesh. Another is a blackthorn rip from the time I'd pushed through a hedge to find the hawk I'd thought I'd lost. And there were other scars, too, but they were not visible. They were the ones she'd helped mend, not make." In some traditions, hawks are considered spirit messengers to a world beyond, and Macdonald comes to understand that part of her bond with Mabel was her desire "to fly with the hawk to find my father; find him and bring him home." But as Mabel matures into a confident hunter, she brings Macdonald a different kind of discovery: that grace resides in the most unlikely places - and that moving forward means leaving some things behind. 'The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief.' VICKI CONSTANTINE CROKE'S latest book is "Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II." She covers animal issues for the WBUR/NPR news program "Here and Now."
Guardian Review
Ten years ago, a confusing encounter changed Helen Macdonald's understanding of the connection between humans and the natural world It was the autumn of 2006 in Uzbekistan, a few months before my father died. I'd driven with a group of other fieldworkers in a Russian jeep down to the banks of the Syrdarya river in Andijan province. Once we'd pitched our tents, I went for a stroll in the hot, blank forest sunlight. It was very still and quiet. My feet crunched on salt-crusted mud and across leaf litter sparking with grasshoppers and sinuous silver lizards. After a mile or so, I found myself in an open clearing and looked up. And that is when I thought I saw a man standing in a tree. That's what my brain told me, momentarily. A man in a long overcoat leaning slightly to one side. And then I saw it wasn't a man, but a goshawk. Moments like this are very illuminating. Despite my lifelong obsession with birds of prey, I'd never thought before, much, about the actual phenomenology of human-hawk resemblance, which must have brought forth all those mythological hawk-human bonds I've studied for so long. Back in the early 2000s, I had been working on my doctoral dissertation in natural history at the University of Cambridge, but I never finished it. I wrote a book about falcons instead. I recounted tales that didn't fit in my PhD -- of the mafia threatening to drive a falconer out of New York City because his falcon was a threat to their pigeon-flying activities, stories of fan dancers, jet pilots, astronauts and the diplomatic shenanigans of early modern royalty. But everything I'd written about this strange symbolic connection between birds of prey and human souls felt as if it had a different kind of truth, now, one forged of things other than books. I looked up at a hawk in a tree, but I saw a man. How curious. This goshawk must have been 80 feet away, so dark against the bright sun I couldn't see whether he was facing me or the river. His short head and snaky neck craned: he was looking at me. I raised my binoculars to my eyes as slowly as I could. There he was. I could see his edges very clearly. The light was very bright but I could faintly see the horizontal barring on his chest feathers. This was an adult male goshawk, and he looked very different from the ones at home. He had a dark head with a flaring pale eyebrow, and the bars on his chest were close-set and far from the thick, broken lines of European birds. He was standing on a bare branch and making up his mind what I was, exactly, and what he should do about it. Slowly, he unfolded his wings, as if putting on a coat, and then, rather quietly and leisurely, he took to the air, one long leg and loosely clenched foot trailing as he went. I was astonished by how long-winged he was, and how much he looked like a big -- albeit long-tailed -- falcon. This was a migrant hawk, one who had travelled down mountains and across plains to find himself here. It wasn't until that dark year with my own hawk Mabel, captured in H is for Hawk, that the visceral truth that we use nature as a mirror of our own needs became something I understood, rather than merely knew. But even so, that sighting of a goshawk in Uzbekistan was the start of my education, the start of understanding the difference between knowing something intellectually and feeling it deep in your bones. That migrant goshawk, and that momentary lapse of focus that made me see him as a person, not a bird -- I wonder, now, if he was also part of the reason I cleaved to a goshawk after my father's death. It is crucial that we try to understand what lies behind the meanings we give to wild animals, including hawks and falcons. It's a project that teaches us about human minds and cultures and the complicated workings of social history, natural history, art and science. But most of all, and more than ever before, we must look long and hard at how we view and interact with the natural world. We are living through the world's sixth great extinction, caused entirely by us, through habitat loss, climate change, chemical contamination of ecosystems by pesticides and herbicides, and urban and agricultural development. Piecing together how and why we see landscapes and creatures as we do, how we value them and why we think we should protect them -- these are questions whose importance is far and above mere academic interest. They are questions to which the answers are simply about how we can save the world. * A new edition of Falcon by Helen Macdonald is published by Reaktion. - Helen Macdonald.
Kirkus Review
An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling griefwith a goshawk.Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald (History and Philosophy/Cambridge Univ.; Falcon, 2006, etc.) tried staving off deep depression with a unique form of personal therapy: the purchase and training of an English goshawk, which she named Mabel. Although a trained falconer, the author chose a raptor both unfamiliar and unpredictable, a creature of mad confidence that became a means of working against madness. "The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life," she writes. As a devotee of birds of prey since girlhood, Macdonald knew the legends and the literature, particularly the cautionary example of The Once and Future King author T.H. White, whose 1951 book The Goshawk details his own painful battle to master his title subject. Macdonald dramatically parallels her own story with White's, achieving a remarkable imaginative sympathy with the writer, a lonely, tormented homosexual fighting his own sadomasochistic demons. Even as she was learning from White's mistakes, she found herself very much in his shoes, watching her life fall apart as the painfully slow bonding process with Mabel took over. Just how much do animals and humans have in common? The more Macdonald got to know her, the more Mabel confounded her notions about what the species was supposed to represent. Is a hawk a symbol of might or independence, or is that just our attempt to remake the animal world in our own image? Writing with breathless urgency that only rarely skirts the melodramatic, Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment. Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it's poignant, thoughtful and movingand likely to become a classic in either genre. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
After the sudden death of her beloved father, Macdonald (history and philosophy of science, Cambridge Univ., England), an experienced falconer, acquired, raised, and trained a goshawk-a bird that is found in North America and Eurasia-as a means of coping with her loss. The author had been captivated by hawks since childhood and upon caring for Mabel, she saw the goshawk's fierce and feral anger mirrored in herself. Using T.H. White's The Goshawk as guidance, Macdonald introduces readers to the craft of falconry, chronicling the patience required to successfully raise and train a hawk. The author's descriptions of Mabel's powerful beauty, along with observations of the natural countryside near Cambridge, are very lovely, but readers might find the British vocabulary too unfamiliar. Also the constant references to White's book and analysis of his life, though they are obviously important to Macdonald, feel superfluous and detract from the focus of the work-the relationship between Mabel and Macdonald. VERDICT Overall, this unsatisfying mishmash of memoir, nature writing, and commentary might be of interest to falconers but will be of limited appeal to armchair naturalists.-Eva Lautemann, formerly with Georgia Perimeter Coll. Lib., Clarkston (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.