When Helen Macdonald lost her father unexpectedly, a man whom she loved and admired very much, she went a little crazy. She’d always been obsessed with falconry, and so she decided (rather spur-of-the-moment) to get a goshawk and train it. A lot of her inspiration came from T. H. White’s The Goshawk, a book that she read as a child — and hated because she felt that White didn’t know what he was doing. “When you are broken, you run. But you don’t always run away. […]
On Bereavement and Raptors
Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is for Hawk received outstanding reviews and several prestigious awards last year. It is the beautifully written story of her grief after her father’s sudden death, the depression that followed, and her attempt to lose herself in falconry. Macdonald is a member of the research faculty at Cambridge University’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and her skills as both researcher and historian are on display throughout the book. She weaves her personal story into the larger world of falconry […]
A Tale of Love, Loss and Hawks
I’m not sure how to review this book. I’m not even sure how to categorize it. Is it about a woman’s depression following the unexpected death of her father? About an intense relationship between woman and hawk? About the seemingly impossible projects we like to focus on when confronted with an unbearable reality? I guess those descriptions are all close, but they don’t seem like enough when trying to explain Helen MacDonald’s stellar H is for Hawk. Here’s the inadequate summary: After her photographer father’s […]
Feminist Witch
This surprising gem of a book, which happens to have been the very first “Book of the Month Club” selection (1926), came to my attention through the delightful New York Times “By the Book” series. Every week, an author or other famous person is interviewed about their favorite books and authors, their least favorite, etc. About a month ago, Helen Macdonald (author of H is for Hawk) was the subject and she mentioned Lolly Willowes as a favorite book. Having never heard of it, I […]