When Helen Macdonald’s father died suddenly on a … Falconry has always been a fuzzy business for me. Verified Purchase. She had an obsession: birds. Authors. Grief, as Helen Macdonald explains in “H Is for Hawk,” is personal—the pain is not to be shared. As a naturalist she has somehow acquired her bird's laser-like visual acuity. H Is for Hawk is an improbable and hybrid creature. 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). Equal parts woman versus nature story, grief stained memoir and disturbing literary biography, H is for Hawk won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2104. In The New York Times Book Review, Vicki Constantine Croke reviews Helen Macdonald’s “H Is for Hawk.” Ms. Croke writes:. Nature: H is for Hawk Helen Macdonald's international best-selling book H Is for Hawk told the story of a grieving daughter who found healing after her father's death, in the form of a goshawk named Mabel. Macdonald is a benevolent memoirist, a wordsmith non pareil, and a mesmerizing, candid observer of life in her world, in Mabel the hawk’s world, and in English dreamworlds. H Is for Hawk is a ghost story not just because of the mesmerizing ghost-tangle it convenes. The essay’s ultimate focus is on fox hunting, but it also explores loneliness and grief, which, as demonstrated in her best-selling 2014 memoir, “H Is for Hawk,” she writes about beautifully. Grove Press | 2015 | ISBN: 978-0802123411 | 288 pages A few weeks before I picked up Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk, I met my young neighbor Jazmín’s pet bird on a visit to the community garden at the end of my block.From inside a bright pink soft-sided cage, the tiny parakeet emitted an alarm of unhappy chirps. Grief, as Helen Macdonald explains in “H Is for Hawk,” is personal—the pain is not to be shared. Helen Macdonald, as she tells it in H Is for Hawk, was an awkward, unlovely, unpopular child. H for Hawk is a harrowing, gut-wrenching and life-affirming account of a person's journey through grief and healing. Perhaps the challenges in her own life predisposed this noted falconer to switch from a lifelong sequence of high-class birds to the one noted for trouble. 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. So let me tell you about “H Is For Hawk”. She conjures the shock of the encounter and simultaneously manages to get inside the head of the bird. Since she was a child, she's been fascinated with falconry and falconers. © 1996-2020, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates, 3,200 global ratings | 2,610 global reviews, Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2019. The narcissism is only partly compensated for by beautiful and impeccable (I needed a dictionary several times) descriptions of nature and snippets from time to time about medieval hawking and the history of hawking. On the surface, H is for Hawk is a falconry book chronicling the training of a Northern Goshawk, and yet it is so much more. H is for Hawk is a record of a spiritual journey—an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald’s struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk’s taming and her own untaming. About the Book H is for Hawk. 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. Helen Macdonald's 'H is for Hawk' is an introspective and profound memoir. Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2015. Perhaps it is because the daughter's grief is so recent and pressing, whereas between Macdonald and White there is much greater emotional distance, but she is a better biographer of White than she is of her own father (perhaps also she has deeper, richer insights into the psychology of a fellow austringer). Her father, Alisdair Macdonald, was a respected photojournalist who died suddenly of a heart attack in 2007. Some of this lopsidedness may be a function of Macdonald's prose. In the literature of falconry, goshawks enjoyed a ruffian's reputation and, in the words of Helen Macdonald, were viewed as "murderous, difficult to tame, sulky, fractious and foreign". In the weaving together of her familial loss with raising one of the world’s most terrifying birds of prey, Helen Macdonald takes readers on a journey I’m sure not many have experienced. H is for Hawk tells Macdonald's story of the year she spent training a northern goshawk in the wake of her father's death. Drifts of chalk beneath. White. by Helen Macdonald. Yet elsewhere she deploys the same stylistic elements to immense effect. Grove Press | 2015 | ISBN: 978-0802123411 | 288 pages A few weeks before I picked up Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk, I met my young neighbor Jazmín’s pet bird on a visit to the community garden at the end of my block.From inside a bright pink soft-sided cage, the tiny parakeet emitted an alarm of unhappy chirps. If I hadn’t been there is no way I could have finished it. At the same time, it’s a kaleidoscopic biography of the brilliant and troubled novelist T. H. White, best known for The Once and Future King . Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk is the best book on the goshawk yet, and may be the best on falconry from the inside. If I wanted to read about TH White, I'd get a biography on TH White! 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. The more I read about it, the more I realized that falconers reside in an unusual life and journey. 5.0 out of 5 stars H is for Hawk. It is a brilliantly written memoir of the darkest time in Helen Macdonald’s life, as she struggled to cope with the sudden death of her father, noted photographer Alisdair Macdonald. "Knapweed. It is one part grief memoir, one part guide to raptors, and one part biography of T. H. White, who chronicled his maiden effort at falconry in The Goshawk , written just before he began work on The Once and Future King .