H Is for Hawk

* NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
* Winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize
* Named the Costa Book of the Year
* #1 best-seller in the UK

When Helen Macdonald's father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer—Helen had been captivated by hawks since childhood—she'd never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators, the goshawk. But in her grief, she saw that the goshawk's fierce and feral temperament mirrored her own. Resolving to purchase and raise the deadly creature as a means to cope with her loss, she adopted Mabel, and turned to the guidance of The Once and Future King author T.H. White's chronicle The Goshawk to begin her challenging endeavor. Projecting herself "in the hawk's wild mind to tame her" tested the limits of Macdonald's humanity and changed her life.

Heart-wrenching and humorous, this book is an unflinching account of bereavement and a unique look at the magnetism of an extraordinary beast, with a parallel examination of a legendary writer's eccentric falconry. Obsession, madness, memory, myth, and history combine to achieve a distinctive blend of nature writing and memoir from an outstanding literary innovator.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802191670
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	03/03/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	56,252
File size:	955 KB

About the Author

Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator, historian, and naturalist, and an affiliated research scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses. She also worked as a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. She is the author of a cultural history of falcons, titled Falcon, and three collections of poetry. As a professional falconer, she assisted with the management of raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia. Twitter: @HelenJMacdonald

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Editorial Reviews

10/15/2014
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

Library Journal

When Helen Macdonald lost her beloved father to a heart attack, she found herself quite suddenly alone. Alisdair Macdonald had been a noted photographer, the kind who also made up weekend jaunts like getting a shot of every bridge that crosses the Thames. He had been wise and warm; a friend and companion to his daughter, a naturalist and poet and then-fellow at Cambridge University. That spring, just as her fellowship was ending, his death loosed a flood of grief in Macdonald. She fell in and out of love, watched the light outside her window grow watery. She felt "odd, overtired, overwrought, unpleasantly like my brain had been removed and my skull stuffed with something like microwaved aluminum foil." In the grip of her sadness, Macdonald began to be pursued by an odd, persistent vision: of flying a goshawk.

The goshawk -- which Macdonald calls "the birdwatcher's dark grail" -- is no ordinary bird: It is giant, bloody, and rare even among falconers, themselves already a rare breed. Then again, even among the rare, Macdonald is no ordinary falconer: she's a young, urban woman and -- unlike many in the sport -- not from a particularly posh background. But she's the sort of person who can be captured by an obsession, and she had been teaching herself and others about hawks since she was a kid. She had flown other hawks for years. She had been watching goshawks the month before her father died, and somehow their image resurfaced and began to haunt her.

Thus, even as Macdonald's grief grows wild, in the year following the news, she latches onto something perhaps yet wilder -- an enormous bird of prey. This decision sets in motion her remarkable memoir, which has already won some terrific British awards, including the Costa and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction. By summer Macdonald enlists a friend to help her drive to Scotland and hand over £800 for a young taloned goshawk she plans to raise and take hunting. About this time Macdonald also starts rereading a formidable old classic, The Goshawk, by T. H. White, whose Arthurian fantasy The Sword and the Stone also contains memorable falconing sequences. She shuns most other humans but engrosses herself in the story of White, a closeted homosexual sadist, who tries to tame his own inner hurt by hawking; and in her own new hawk, now named Mabel, whom she feeds bits of raw steak in her living room.

Macdonald's own hurt makes her desperately want what Mabel brings her: a radical unsettlement from her own body; a temporary reprieve from human logic, and a sense that she can be invisible. The hawk -- even in a cage, even in straps hawkers call jesses -- transports her out of complicated twenty-first-century life and through literary time and toward an innerness whose shapes feel more manageable. "I was in the grip of very old and emotional ways of moving through landscape," she writes, "experiencing forms attention and deportment beyond conscious control."

Yet her feelings are very human, too. As Macdonald raises the hawk, she teeters toward what many of us might recognize as depression. She takes better care of the hawk then she does of herself -- the hawk has fresh air and fresh pheasant to eat, while Macdonald lets the bills pile up, chain- smokes, and eats frozen pizza. Yet in a curious way, the hawk, with its fierceness, also keeps Macdonald's own ferocities at bay. Ruefully, looking back on the months she battled sorrow while preparing Mabel to hunt and kill, Macdonald reflects that perhaps "I was never truly mad. More mad north by northwest. I could tell a hawk from a handsaw always, but sometimes it was striking to me how similar they were."

Yet if the hawk is like the handsaw, the hawk is also like grief -- a thing not subject to human reason or rule. Nevertheless it is managing the hawk -- in its very wildness -- that brings Macdonald, slowly, through her own tempest. Paradoxically, it's culture rather than nature that she finally does turn to. Somewhere toward the end of the year, Macdonald sees a therapist, and rather than losing herself to wilderness and invisibility makes use of a distinctly rationalist method -- antidepressants help her find her way out of the fog. Little by little the book assembles itself. In the end the radical joy of being near something so untamable and essentially other paves a way for Macdonald to tame herself, to go on living. Macdonald leaves the mystery of this encounter open. After all, Macdonald discovers that in ways she has been wild like her goshawk, but she has also been wild like the reindeer lichen she pockets one day when she's been hawk watching, the very reindeer moss she'd held when she learned her father was dead. "Keep reindeer moss in the dark, freeze it, dry it to a crisp, it won't die. It goes dormant and waits for things to improve. Impressive stuff."

Impressive stuff indeed. We might say the same about Macdonald's own rich journey.

Tess Taylor is the author of The Misremembered World, a collection of poems. Her nonfiction and poetry have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.
Reviewer: Tess Taylor

Helen Macdonald's beautiful and nearly feral first book…is so good that, at times, it hurt me to read it. It draws blood, in ways that seem curative…H Is for Hawk seems to me a small, instant classic of nature writing, expansive in ways that recall Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), and as in touch with cruelty. It has, as well, some of the winding emotional reverb of Cheryl Strayed's Wild (2012). Yet this book is very English. Ms. Macdonald's sentences, like David Bowie's teeth (pre-veneers), are appealingly crooked. Nearly every paragraph is strange, injected with unexpected meaning.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

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…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…Although "animal as emotional healer" is a familiar motif, Macdonald's journey clears its own path—messy, muddy and raw.

The New York Times Book Review - Vicki Constantine Croke

"Breathtaking . . . 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." —Vicki Constantine Croke, New York Times Book Review (cover review)
"Helen Macdonald’s beautiful and nearly feral book, H Is for Hawk, 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. . . . [An] instant classic." —Dwight Garner, New York Times
"Extraordinary . . . indelible . . . [it contains] one of the most memorable passages I’ve read this year, or for that matter this decade . . . Mabel is described so vividly she becomes almost physically present on the page." —Lev Grossman, TIME
"Captivating and beautifully written, it’s a meditation on the bond between beasts and humans and the pain and beauty of being alive." —People (Book of the Week)
"One of the loveliest things you’ll read this year . . . You’ll never see a bird overhead the same way again." —Jason Sheeler, Entertainment Weekly
"[A] singular book that combines memoir and landscape, history and falconry . . . it is not like anything I've ever read . . . what Macdonald tells us so eloquently in her fine memoir [is] that transformation of our docile or resigned lives can be had if we only look up into the world." —Susan Straight, Los Angeles Times
"Had there been an award for the best new book that defies every genre, I imagine it would have won that too. . . . Coherent, complete, and riveting, perhaps the finest nonfiction I read in the past year." —Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker
"The art of Macdonald’s book is in the way that she weaves together various kinds of falling apart—the way she loops one unraveling thread of meaning into another. . . . What’s lovely about [it] is the clarity with which she sees both the inner and outer worlds that she lives in." —Caleb Crain, New York Review of Books
"One of the most riveting encounters between a human being and an animal ever written." —Simon Worrall, National Geographic
"Assured, honest and raw . . . a soaring wonder of a book." —Daneet Steffens, Boston Globe
"An elegantly written amalgam of nature writing, personal memoir, literary portrait and an examination of bereavement. . . . It illuminates unexpected things in unexpected ways." —Guy Gavriel Kay, Washington Post
"To categorize this work as merely memoir, nature writing or spiritual writing would understate [Macdonald’s] achievement . . . her prose glows and burns." —Karin Altenberg, Wall Street Journal
"Dazzling." —Kate Guadagnino, Vogue
"Unsparing, fierce . . . a superior accomplishment. There’s not a line here that rings false; every insight is hard won . . . Macdonald has found the ideal balance between art and truth." —David Laskin, Seattle Times
"One of the best books about nature that I've ever read. Macdonald's wonderful gift for language and her keen observations bring pleasure to every page." —Karen Sandstrom, Cleveland Plain Dealer
"[With] sumptuously poetic prose . . . there is deft interplay between agony and ecstasy, elegy and rebirth, wildness and domesticity, alongside subtle reminders about the cruelty of nature and our necessary faith in humanity." —Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"One of a kind . . . Macdonald is a poet, her language rich and taut. . . . As she descends into a wild, nearly mad connection with her hawk, her words keep powerful track. . . . [She] brings her observer's eye and poet's voice to the universal experience of sorrow and loss." —Barbara Brotman, Chicago Tribune
"A triumph." —Nick Willoughby, Salon
"The hawk-book's form is perfect. It prickles your skin the way nature can when you are surprised by an animal in your path. Some books are not books but visitations, and this one has crossed its share of thresholds before arriving here, to an impossible middle perch between wilderness and culture, past and present, life and death." —Katy Waldman, Slate
"A genre-busting dazzler of a book, worthy of the near-universal accolades that it's received so far." —Elisabeth Donnelly, Flavorwire
"Extraordinary . . . Macdonald elegantly weaves multitudinous and extremely complex issues into a single work of seamless prose." —Lucy Scholes, The Daily Beast
"The echoes of myth in Macdonald’s writing, however subtle and unobtrusive, lend her book an emotional weight usually reserved only for literature, and a grace only for poetry. But this is one of the book’s great achievements: to belong to several genres at once, and to succeed at all of them." —Madeleine Larue, The Millions
"[Macdonald’s] writing—about soil and weather, myth and history, pain and its slow easing—retains the qualities of [her hawk] Mabel's wild heart, and the commanding scope and piercing accuracy of her hawk's eye." —Joanna Scutts, Newsday
"Brutal yet redemptive . . . a real stunner." —Alexis Burling, The Oregonian
"Gorgeous." —Diane Rehm, The Diane Rehm Show
"A wonder both of nature and of meditative writing." —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air with Terry Gross
"To read Helen Macdonald's new memoir is to have every cell of your body awake and alive." —Robin Young, Here and Now
"In this profoundly inquiring and wholly enrapturing memoir, Macdonald exquisitely and unforgettably entwines misery and astonishment, elegy and natural history, human and hawk." —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
"An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief—with a goshawk. . . . Writing with breathless urgency . . . 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 moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A unique and beautiful book with a searing emotional honesty, and descriptive language that is unparalleled in modern literature." —Costa Book Award citation
"H is for Hawk is a work of great spirit and wonder, illuminated equally by terror and desire. Each beautiful sentence is capable of taking a reader’s breath. The book is built of feather and bone, intelligence and blood, and a vulnerability so profound as to conjure that vulnerability’s shadow, which is the great power of honesty. It is not just a definitive work on falconry; it is a definitive work on humanity, and all that can and cannot be possessed." —Rick Bass
"A lovely touching book about a young woman grieving over the death of her father becoming rejuvenated by training one of the roughest, most difficult creatures in the heavens, the goshawk." —Jim Harrison
"In addition to being an excellent memoir of loss and grief, H is for Hawk is a wonderful exploration of how birds of prey can function as metaphor to produce art and a roadmap for human lives. Read it and enrich your life." —Dan O’Brien
"Rich with the poetry of ideation, the narrative flows through the author’s deeply textured story of personal loss like a mountain wind, swirling seamlessly through fields of literature, biology, natural history, and the art of hunting with hawks. Readers might do well to absorb this book a bite at a time—but be prepared for a full meal." —Lynn Schooler
"A beautiful book on so many levels. Macdonald fearlessly probes each facet of grief and traverses its wilderness to reach redemption. But most beautiful of all is the complex, layered bond that builds between her and Mabel, her hawk. Who would have guessed that human and bird could share so much?" —Jan DeBlieu
"In this elegant synthesis of memoir and literary sleuthing . . . Macdonald describes in beautiful, thoughtful prose how she comes to terms with death in new and startling ways." —Publishers Weekly
"A dazzling piece of work: deeply affecting, utterly fascinating and blazing with love . . . a deeply human work shot through, like cloth of gold, with intelligence and compassion—an exemplar of the mysterious alchemy by which suffering can be transmuted into beauty. I will be surprised if a better book than H is for Hawk is published this year." —Melissa Harrison, Financial Times
"More than any other writer I know, including her beloved [T.H.] White, Macdonald is able to summon the mental world of a bird of prey . . . she extends the boundaries of nature writing. As a naturalist she has somehow acquired her bird's laser-like visual acuity. As a writer she combines a lexicographer's pleasure in words as carefully curated objects with an inventive passion for new words or for ways of releasing fresh effects from the old stock. . . . Macdonald looks set to revive the genre." —Mark Cocker, Guardian
"A talon-sharp memoir that will thrill and chill you to the bone . . . Macdonald has just the right blend of the scientist and the poet, of observing on the one hand and feeling on the other." —Craig Brown, Daily Mail
"What [Macdonald] has achieved is a very rare thing in literature—a completely realistic account of a human relationship with animal consciousness. . . . Her training of Mabel has the suspense and tension of the here and now. You are gripped by the slightest movement, by the turn of every feather. It is a soaring performance and Mabel is the star." —John Carey, Sunday Times
"A well-wrought book, one part memoir, one part gorgeous evocation of the natural world and one part literary meditation . . . lit with flashes of grace, a grace that sweeps down to the reader to hold her wrist tight with beautiful, terrible claws. The discovery of the season." —Erica Wagner, Economist
"The magnificent H is for Hawk [has] grabbed me by its talons . . . [it’s] nature writing, but not as you know it. Astounding." —Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller
"It sings. I couldn’t stop reading." —Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Spot of Bother
"This beautiful book is at once heartfelt and clever in the way it mixes elegy with celebration: elegy for a father lost, celebration of a hawk found - and in the finding also a celebration of countryside, forbears of one kind and another, life-in-death. At a time of very distinguished writing about the relationship between human kind and the environment, it is immediately pre-eminent." —Andrew Motion, author of In the Blood
"A deep, dark work of terrible beauty that will open fissures in the stoniest heart. . . . Macdonald is a survivor . . . she has produced one of the most eloquent accounts of bereavement you could hope to read . . . A grief memoir with wings." —The Bookseller
"A book made from the heart that goes to the heart . . . It combines old and new nature and human nature with great originality. No one who has looked up to see a bird of prey cross the sky could read it and not have their life shifted." —Tim Dee, author of The Running Sky
"The most magical book I have ever read." —Olivia Laing, author of The Trip to Echo Springs

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