"Breeding goshhawks isn't for the faint-hearted." "Human hands are for holding other hands. They are not for breaking the necks of rabbits, pulling loops of viscera out of necks out onto leaf-litter while the hawk dips her head to drink blood from her quarry's chest cavity" .... Falconry is not pet keeping. We learn just how time consuming it must be-- --the dedication -the passion it takes to even appreciate the depths of ...'the sport'...'the art'....'the meditation'. Helen Macdonald is also a writer - a poet - with a deep love for nature. With the authors extraordinary talents she has written something rarer than rare. The writing itself will take your breathe away.After the loss of Helen's father --a very deep loss --she says:"I thought that to heal my hurt, I should flee to the wild. It is what people did. The nature books I'd read told me so. So many had been quests inspired by grief or sadness". We take a journey with Helen --while she is healing. Along the way --she tells us not only 'her' story ---training her Goshawk she names *Mabel* -- the many details involved -and emotions she personally goes through ---but she tells us 'why' its important to include storytelling about the author T. H. White. A lonely man -complicated -unhappy - with suppressed homosexual desire. As a reader --your curiosity grows. Your thoughts may change from time to time. I've even asked myself --where do you draw the line between an obsession and passion? I found myself curious to learn more -- 1) I spent an hour watching utubes on Falconry ---(beautiful photos from Nigel Hawkins) 2) I spent at least an hour in discussion with my husband with over this book. He plans to read it next.3) I read more about T. H. White. "The Once and Future King" has raving reviews. I'm now interested in reading his Arthurian Fantasy novel. 4) I'm suggesting our local book club read this book together. Much can be discussed... (death, loss, healing, Goshawks, T.H. White, how adults leave impressions on children, personal growth, the value of balance with solitude in nature with a busy every day life) I sit here with MY BIRDS --(Phil, Jill, & Lil) -- I/we want to than THE AUTHOR --GROVE ATLANTIC & Netgalley for making this available for me to read.

I didn't know what to expect from this book, despite having read the summary and several glowing reviews. It seemed to have an odd premise, added to that I'm not a huge fan of reading non fiction, nor do I have an interest in birds of prey. Nonetheless, I was intrigued and grabbed a copy, and I'm glad I did. The story itself is not so much about hawks, as it is about Macdonald dealing with grief and finding a reason to get up in the morning. This was, for me, not unputdownable, however, I immediately warmed to the author's voice and the language is beautifully descriptive, almost poetic at times, a love letter to her father, to her hawk, to nature. I won't go so far as to say this book has me turning into a fan of falconry, but it does rouse an interest in exploring Macdonald's other writing, purely for her style and memorable voice. A worthwhile read.Just as an aside - weirdly, I just opened my email to see a Groupon for Falconry School?!Find more reviews and bookish fun at http://www.princessandpen.com

The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.Helen MacDonald had suffered a great loss. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote, Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Perhaps the same might be applied to grieving. I know for myself, during an acute period of grieving I was practically unable to speak for well over a month, probably not a typical experience. MacDonalds reaction was just a wee bit more unusual than mine. She decided to train a goshawk. Helen MacDonald and friend - from The Daily MailThe loss of a person, whether through death, distance, or alienation, can bring about a significant crisis of identity. In MacDonalds case, she had to lose her self, to an almost pathological degree, in order to find a way forward with her life. H is for Hawk is her tale of that journey. Of course, being a Cambridge-educated writer and naturalist, research fellow at Jesus College of Cambridge, and research scholar with the Cambridge Department of History and Philosophy, she brought a fair bit of writerly and intellectual heft to the task. I was in ruins. Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.Hope may be a thing with feathers, but in MacDonalds case, it was also a thing with a rapier beak, death-dealing claws and a penchant for killing. MacDonald named her Mabel. She takes us along on her year-long struggle to master both her hawk and her grief. MacDonald had been very close with her father, well-known, award-winning news photographer, Alisdair MacDonald. It was he who had introduced her to hawking as a child. Training a hawk was her way of connecting to her father. Helen MacDonald with dad, Alisdair MacDonald - from Suffolk MagazineAnd then she added another dimension to this experience. There are four primary threads here. The first is MacDonalds ongoing struggle to train Mabel. The second is her family history with her father. The third is her emotional, existential struggle to find a passage through her grief to the light. The fourth is her consideration TH White. T.H. White and friend - from Anendlessbanquet.comTerence Hanbury White gained considerable renown for writing The Once and Future King, The Sword in the Stone, and more. But he also wrote a book about his experience with falconry. MacDonald finds much in his book, The Goshawk, that touches her, reminding her of her childhood falconry bonding with dad. But she digs deeper, generating some in-depth analysis of Whites life and work. While his writing had garnered him considerable wealth and fame, Whites personal inclinations and struggles are not so well known. He had had, to put it kindly, a less than nurturing upbringing, with a particularly cold and remote father. He was gay, with sado-masochistic impulses, which was not exactly a comfy fit in the mid 20th century. MacDonald sees in his writing an expression of this inner self. When White writes about his love for the countryside, at heart he is writing about a hope that he might be able to love himself. But the countryside wasnt just something that was safe for White to love it was a love that was safe to write about. It took me a long time to realize how many of our classical books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.Both White and MacDonald used hawking as a way to step away from the world. She also sees an expression of Whites violent inclinations, and recognizes a bloodlust in herself as she assists Mabel in the slaughter of local fauna. In referring to a scene in which White tells of a fox being ripped to bits In this bloody scene, one man escaped Whites revulsion: the huntsman, a red-faced, grave and gentlemanly figure who stood by the hounds and blew the mort on his hunting horn, the formal act of parting to commemorate the death of the fox. By some strange alchemyhis closeness to the pack, his expert command of themthe huntsman was not horrible. For White it was a moral magic trick, a way out of his conundrum. By skillfully training a hunting animal, by closely associating with it, by identifying with it, you might be allowed to experience all your vital, sincere desires, even your most bloodthirsty ones, in total innocence. You could be true to yourself.This was something that appealed to White, a publicly sanctioned milieu in which he could express his bloody desires. MacDonald recognizes the feeling of bloodlust in herself, as well.The original cover of The GoshawkWe are treated to a bit of falconry history, consideration being given to the class and gender elements.I saw those nineteenth century falconers were projecting onto their hawks all the male qualities they thought threatened by modern life; wildness, power, virility, independence, and strength. By identifying with their hawks as they trained them, they could introject, or repossess, those qualities. At the same time they could exercise their power by civilising a wild and primitive creature. Masculinity and conquest; two imperial myths for the price of one.The book is filled not only with her emotional struggle to recover, but with some breath-taking nature writing.The bare field wed flown the hawk upon is covered in gossamer, millions of shining threads combed downwind across every inch of soil. Lit by the sinking sun the quivering silk runs like light on water all the way to my feet. It is a thing of unearthly beauty, the work of a million tiny spiders searching for new homes. Each had spun a charged silken thread out into the air to pull it from its hatch-place, ascending like intrepid hot-air balloonists to drift and disperse and fall.Does being in nature offer a salve to human suffering? Or does it reveal more of who we really are? MacDonald obviously survived her trial by feather with her personality, her core intact. It will not feel entirely clear as you read this that she will. MacDonald is gloriously adept at bringing you into her experience, leading you to wonder the things she wonders, to feel the pain of her struggle. H is for Hawk is a magnificent achievement, taking us along with the author on her dark road, but offering glimpses of glory, of growth and understanding, while teaching us a bit about something most of us have never encountered, and giving us an expanded appreciation for one of the most beloved authors of the 20th Century. If you have not yet had the pleasure of reading H is for Hawk (I know there are some of you out there), I cannot urge you more vociferously to snatch off your hoods, fly to your bookstore and pounce on a copy before they are all gone. You will find in this book a very satisfying feast.This review posted 10/14/16Published 7/31/14PS - Lena Headey, the actress who plays queen Circei Lannister on The Game of Thrones bought the film rights to the book in April 2015. I do not know if the project has progressed to a development stage.=============================EXTRA STUFFH is for Hawk has won a claw full of prizes and recognition-----2014 Samuel Johnson Prize (now the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction) winner-----2014 Costa Book of the Year winner-----2014 Duff Cooper Prize shortlist-----2015 Thwaites Wainwright Prize longlist-----2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction - shortlistLinks to the authors Twitter and FB pagesArticle - Rapt - by Kathryn Schultz New Yorker Magazine March 9, 2015Radio interview - WBUR in Boston 11:16Videos-----MacDonald talk at 5 x 15 - 16:18-----Macdonald with Mary Karr at 92nd Street Y - 1:17:51-----MacDonald on BBC News Meet the Author - 3:04----- Helen at a bookstore in DC - 58:25 excellent her talk is for the first 30 minutes - Politics and Prose is the site -----Helen reads TH White-----The entire film, The Goshawk, based on TH Whites bookJuly 25, 2017 - An interesting National Geographic piece about a red-tail hawk going through an unusual upbringing - Why This Young Hawk Thinks Its an Eagle - By Sarah Gibbens

This is one of those quiet books that links nature and human grief without really sentimentalising it. Macdonald trains Mabel (the goshawk) as a way of reconnecting with herself, of dealing with grief about her fathers death, and she writes about that beautifully without ever reducing it to a picture-perfect moment of nature healing or something. I actually found it pretty painful to read: recognising some of the grief, the depression; knowing all about that disconnection.I can see why people dont enjoy it. Its had good press, and won awards, but its not an exciting triumph against adversity or a horror story written to wring the heart, something like A Child Called It. Its a meandering through grief and back to the world, with literary allusions, glances back over the shoulder at history, at T.H. White. In a way, its a biography of T.H. White, as encapsulated in his own battles with his hawk I feel like I understand him more now through Macdonald than I ever did through reading his work.Its not an uplifting story. Its not a triumph. Its uncompromising and lovely, like the hawk herself, and you have to accept the beauty as it comes, with the raw meat and grim struggles it entails as well.

H is for Hawk could be H is for Hope or Heart or Home as all of these capture in some small way the essence of this beautiful book. When Helen Macdonalds father dies, she finds herself inconsolable in her grief. In an effort to heal her soul and regain a connection with her father she sets out to find and train a hawk. Not just any hawk, a Goshawk. And here is just one of the beauties of her story. The descriptions of her Goshawk, Mabel, are so vivid that I can see her in all her regal glory. Interspersed with the detailed portrait of the patience and care it takes to train a hawk, Macdonald also writes a semi-biographical portrait of the author T.H. White. Some readers may find this tedious. Though it was interesting to learn more about White, who also had a penchant for hawks (though not the patience of Macdonald), I did want her to get on with her own story. Macdonald uses Whites The Goshawk as inspiration and a guide in her own training of Mabel. She seems to be better for it but we may not need to hear it all. One reviewer thought the book had little about grieving. I cant say I hold that opinion. We all grieve in our own way and I thought there was much about Macdonalds process through her pain and feelings of loss. It is about the hawk but there is much about grief. Another stated that the Elisabeth Kubler Rosss fives stages of grief is bunk. I disagree with this also. Though we may not visit them in the order Ross outlines, and they may have evolved through time, we all go through some form of these as listed, Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. You can change the wording and perhaps the definition but I am a firm believer that there are steps to healing and that we do it in our own way and in our own time. There are many excellent reviews of H is for Hawk. Read a few and youll see that it is a favorite of readers.I listened to H is for Hawk, read by the author who does justice to her own story and imparts the lushness of the language. One passage I particularly liked follows. I think she began this with a thought that nature books told her to flee to the wildto grieve.Nature in her green tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions, wrote John Muir. Earth has no sorrows that earth cannot heal. Now I knew this for what it was, a beguiling but dangerous lie. I was furious with myself and my own unconscious certainty that this was the cure I needed. Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild in not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.With Mabel she finds another world and a way back to her father in a communion with her mourning, a place she calls that other world. And that part of me had hoped, too, that somewhere in that other world was my father. His death had been so sudden. There had been no time to prepare for it, no sense in it happening at all. He could only be lost. He was out there, still, somewhere out there in that tangled wood with all the rest of the lost and dead. I know now what those dreams in spring had meant, the ones of the hawk slipping through a rent in the air into another world. Id want to fly with the hawk to find my father; find him and bring him home.