by Helen Macdonald
This book is about Macdonald dealing with the sudden death of her father by leaving academia to train a goshawk. This book is also part biography of T.H. White, and according to Macdonald part nature writing. It just didn’t really work for me, and I feel bad about that. I really struggle to rate a...
Snow Globes: Reads Bells: Activities I intend to also read a book for the Kwanzaa square and try to get as many of my as-yet missing activities done (Holiday Down Under, Movie Ticket, and Holiday Party), but since completing either activities or reads qualifies for completing a square, as far as t...
I had high expectations for this one, and it was amazing. The contrasts that Macdonald manages to hold in balance! Grief and savagery, science and literature, singlemindedness and insanity, bravery and panic, memory and immediacy, studied technique and desperation, commitment and unravelling. Honest...
This is Helen Macdonald's story of training a goshawk. Her father had just died when she decided to train this hawk. She has been interesting in falconry since a child and this is her first attempt at training a hawk. As she is training, she is also battling depression which she does not realize at ...
As a way of dealing with the grief of her father's death, Helen Macdonald seizes upon the idea of training a goshawk she names Mabel. T H White enters the story because his memoir titled The Goshawk is one of her inspirations. This book is part memoir, part biography, and part naturalist guide. Even...
I came to this one without knowing a single thing about it. As it turns out, it was an absorbing personal account of the author's struggles following the death of her father. The narrative weaves together several interesting threads, including the training of Mabel, her new goshawk; the parallel des...
I expected this book to be informative, to be about natural history, ie. about hawks. And there was that in the book. But more than that, which I was not expecting, was the depth of paralyzing grief which ran the gamut of the book. I knew that this memoir was penned after the author's father passed ...
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