Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    H Is for Hawk
    Unavailable
    H Is for Hawk
    Unavailable
    H Is for Hawk
    Ebook335 pages6 hours

    H Is for Hawk

    By Helen Macdonald

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGrove Press
    Release dateMar 3, 2015
    ISBN9780802191670
    Unavailable
    H Is for Hawk
    Author

    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

    Related to H Is for Hawk

    Related ebooks

    Women's Biographies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      30 Books in 30 Days: Lab Girl

      Mar 13, 2017

      In the 30 Books in 30 Days series  leading up to the March 16 announcement of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Michele Filgate offers an appreciation of auto

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Cure For Life

      Sep 26, 2021

      The Cure For Life
      3 min read

    • Article

      Silent All These Years: On Annie Dillard

      Jul 29, 2021

      The way we talk about Annie Dillard makes me sad and afraid. Sad because we're unable to appreciate her work if we can't see how she is just one of us. And afraid because affixing someone with otherness is the first stage in allowing that someone to

      15 min read

    • Article

      Jean Hanff Korelitz: ‘The Idea For The Story Was A Thunderbolt That Came Out Of Nowhere’

      Mar 23, 2021

      “I was really interested in writing about the theme of decimating a life that looked good from the outside. What if this woman, who was incredibly together and hubristic enough to presume to tell other people how to live their lives, was so blind to

      5 min read

    • Article

      What Makes It A Cape?

      Jul 30, 2021

      The earliest Cape Cod–style houses were built by Puritans in New England; the snug, one-story homes were designed to withstand the harsh environment. Many of their signature features still remain popular today. SIMPLE FORMS The original homes were ei

      1 min read

    • Article

      Patrick Radden Keefe

      Mar 4, 2019

      After four years researching one of the most notorious killings in Northern Ireland’s history, the New Yorker staff writer made a shocking discovery that may have actually solved the crime. His new book, Say Nothing, claims to unmask the person who f

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Wolf Is Tearing Up the Place

      Feb 8, 2018

      “The wolf, I’m afraid, is inside tearing up the place.” –Flannery O’Connor The severity of my daughter’s illness didn’t hit me until the day she collapsed at the hospital. An emergency response team whisked her into surgery to drain her lungs.

      8 min read

    • Article

      THE WD INTERVIEW Amor Towles

      Sep 18, 2019

      THE WD INTERVIEW Amor Towles
      9 min read

    • Article

      Olga Tokarczuk Explores the Live Chain That Connects and Fetters Us in ‘Flights’

      Aug 9, 2018

      In a section of Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk’s Man Booker International Prize-winning novel Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, the wife and toddler of a man named Kunicki disappear while they are on vacation on a tiny island. After a long day spe

      7 min read

    Reviews for H Is for Hawk

    4.5/5

    21 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      This 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.
    • 5/5
      "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