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Book Reviewed by:Winner of the 2015 BookBrowse Nonfiction Award
Obsession, madness, memory, myth, and history combine to achieve a distinctive blend of nature writing and memoir from an outstanding literary innovator.
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.
Costa Book Awards
2014
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BookBrowse Awards
2015
Costa Book Awards
2014
In the end, Macdonald — as she begins to emerge from the grief that has almost consumed her — is able to reflect on larger questions, such as how and why humans imbue wild creatures with human qualities and whose version of "nature" is worth preserving. Most of all, she realizes that — her genuine and hard-won affection for Mabel notwithstanding — she needs more than a raptor counterpart to find herself truly human...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
In T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone (the first book in The Once and Future King series), young Arthur is transformed by his tutor, the wizard Merlyn, into a small falcon known as the merlin. In the short chapter focusing on Arthur's adventures among the raptors, he is both terrified and fascinated by the half-mad Colonel Cully, a bloodthirsty, raving goshawk. This scene, as fantastical as it might be, nevertheless illuminates some of the conventional wisdom surrounding goshawks. Macdonald quotes one falconry textbook that characterizes goshawks as developing "symptoms of passing madness." Large, bloodthirsty, impossible to understand or relate to, goshawks are mysterious creatures in Macdonald's book — and even more so in White's....
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