H is for Hawk, a new memoir by Helen Macdonald, came to my attention through a hugely favorable review in yesterday’s New York Times. Although it hasn’t quite been released in the U.S.—it comes out on March 3, published by Grove Press, but has been out in England for a while—it’s already #39 on Amazon, has received starred reviews by Kirkus and Booklist, and is destined to be a big bestseller. The good thing is that it’s largely about natural history: a woman who, traumatized by her father’s sudden death, finds respite in training a goshawk to hunt. From the Times review:
Helen Macdonald’s beautiful and nearly feral book, “H Is for Hawk,” her first published in the United States, reminds us that excellent nature writing can lay bare some of the intimacies of the wild world as well. Her book is so good that, at times, it hurt me to read it. It draws blood, in ways that seem curative.
Ms. Macdonald is British, and when we meet her in this memoir, she is in her 30s, with “no partner, no children, no home.” Her fellowship at the University of Cambridge is coming to an end. When her father, a newspaper photographer, dies suddenly on a London street, it steals the floor from beneath her.
She has been obsessed with birds of prey since she was a girl, and is an experienced falconer. In her grief, to escape into something, she begins to train one of nature’s most vicious predators, a goshawk. She unplugs her telephone. She tells her friends to leave her alone.
Every review I’ve seen has been very favorable. Here’s one from the Guardian
Macdonald struggled to put her complicated life back together but two parts of her unusual restorative therapy were the acquisition of a goshawk called Mabel and a year-long plan to tame and train her to hunt. H is for Hawk is at once a misery memoir, as the author grapples with the grieving process, and a falconer’s diary about the hard-won trust between hawk and human. Yet she also splices into her narrative a biographical account of a literary hero and fellow austringer (the title for one who trains goshawks): TH White.
You can read more about this book for yourself, and can even preview it by reading select pages on Amazon, but I know that I, for one, will be reading it.
Surprisingly, the Times doesn’t mention an obvious comparison for Macdonald’s work: the absolutely wonderful book The Peregrine by J. A. Baker. It recounts a year’s observation of peregrine falcons in Essex, and contains some of the most beautiful nature writing I’ve ever read. If you have a birder, an outdoor person, a nature lover, or simply a lover of good prose in your life, you could do worse than to give them Baker’s book. I wrote a lot about it during “Peregrine Week” nearly five years ago, so you can read some selections at the previous link. Baker, like Macdonald, seems to have suffered some trauma that led him to the birds, but it isn’t made explicit in his book.
Here’s the author of H is for Hawk:
And here is a northern goshawk (Accipiter gentilis), an individual similar to the one Macdonald Trained:
Professor Ceiling Cat may wish, having a bit more post Albatross time (?!), to read Baker’s other book, in an edition with Peregrine
The Peregrine, The Hill of Summer & Diaries; The Complete Works of J.A. Baker, Introduction by Mark Cocker & Edited by John Fanshawe, Collins 2011, ISBN 978-0-00-739590-3
Note that Mark Crocker has written Crow Country about Rooks et al…
It’s part of the new edition of The Peregrine; they’ve been published together. Sadly, that book isn’t in our library, though the original The Peregrine is, and I don’t buy any more books save the most essential ones.
I’ve read T.H. White’s The Goshawk. I enjoyed it; my husband loved it.
I think I will recommend this new book to him.
I am intrigued plenty, will have to read it. You led me to The Peregrine, and that was a very good read indeed.
I have to wonder at the natural selection influences over time leading to the pattern of the hawk’s feathers as compared to, for example, a red tail hawk or owl or eagle.
I rejoice in her apparently having such a good relationship with her father, and for having had him in her life at least into her thirties. Not everyone is that fortunate.
Thanks for mentioning this book. I _think_ I read about it before, but didn’t make a note, and then forgot about it until now.
It may have been in “Nature” that I read about it; small excerpt from “Books in Brief”, July 31 2014: “Soars beyond genres, and burns with emotional and intellectual intensity.”
The Peregrine is also still on my wishlist.
“she begins to train one of nature’s most vicious predators, a goshawk”.
A pity the Times review chose to describe goshawks in such unnecessarily pejorative terms. Goshawks are beautifully adapted and effective predators but really no more or less vicious than a chickadee going after caterpillars. Goshawks suffer a good deal of persecution and really don’t need the bad press.
Jerry, about interesting books, do you pretend to read Michael Shermer’s latest book, The Moral Arc?
What will JAC have inside it that he’s really reading?
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To all your Canadian readers, I went to amazon.ca to check it out and the kindle version is free!
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I’m so happy that Helen MacDonald was able to assuage her emotional trauma by enslaving and training goshawks. No wait,actually I find it incredible narcissistic. I was once a witness to a display of the sport of falconry,and seeing those noble birds chained to perches with leather blinders on broke my heart. Maybe she should try training killer whales for Sea World next,
Have you read the book? I have. It did not seem to me that the goshawk suffered from its interaction with Macdonald. And “noble”? Maybe, if you like serial killers.
Maybe because it wasn’t written from their point of view.
And what about noble wolves on leashes? And being made to lead blind people about? &c.
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If you could get a wolf to lead the blind without eating them, more power to ya.
It happens all the time, larry.
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Domesticated dog aren’t wolves.
Of course they are, just like we’re apes.
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Yea, let’s label all predatory animals as “serial killer” but that includes you too.
If you want a nature that in your control, it’s a nature you’ve lost.
Reblogged this on Mark Solock Blog.