H Is for Hawk

Author: Helen Macdonald
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802191673
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year One of Slate's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Last 25 Years ON MORE THAN 25 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR LISTS: including TIME (#1 Nonfiction Book), NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine (10 Favorite Books), Vogue (Top 10), Vanity Fair, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle (Top 10), Miami Herald, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Minneapolis Star Tribune (Top 10), Library Journal (Top 10), Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Slate, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, Amazon (Top 20) The instant New York Times bestseller and award-winning sensation, Helen Macdonald's story of adopting and raising one of nature's most vicious predators has soared into the hearts of millions of readers worldwide. Fierce and feral, her goshawk Mabel's temperament mirrors Helen's own state of grief after her father's death, and together raptor and human "discover the pain and beauty of being alive" (People). H Is for Hawk is a genre-defying debut from one of our most unique and transcendent voices.

H is for Hawk

Author: Helen Macdonald
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448130727
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
Discover the number one bestselling phenomenon that is a powerful and profound mediation on grief expressed through the trials of training a goshawk. **SELECTED BY CARIAD LLOYD ON BBC TWO'S BETWEEN THE COVERS** As a child, Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer, learning the arcane terminology and reading all the classic books. Years later, when her father died and she was struck deeply by grief, she became obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She bought Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and took her home to Cambridge, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals. H is for Hawk is an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming. This is a book about memory, nature and nation, and how it might be possible to reconcile death with life and love. 'This beautiful book is at once heartfelt and clever in the way it mixes elegy with celebration' Andrew Motion 'It just sings. I couldn't stop reading' Mark Haddon, bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time 'Dazzling... Deeply affecting, utterly fascinating and blazing with love and intelligence' Financial Times

The Goshawk

Author: T. H. White
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Goshawk" by T. H. White. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Shaler's Fish

Author: Helen Macdonald
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802190707
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 98

Book Description
“Devoted readers of H Is for Hawk will find Macdonald’s gift for stunning language, patient curiosity, and expansive wisdom on full display in her poems.”—Publishers Weekly From the naturalist and author of the New York Times bestseller H is for Hawk, which appeared on more than twenty-five Best Books of the Year lists, Shaler’s Fish is a collection of poetry that roams both the outer and inner landscapes of the poet’s universe, seamlessly fusing reflections on language, science, and literature with the loamy environments of the natural worlds around her. Moving between the epic (war, history, art, myth, philosophy) and the specific (CNN, Ancient Rome, Auden, Merleau-Ponty), Helen Macdonald examines with humor and intellect what it means to be awake and watchful in the world. These are poems that probe and question, within whose nimble ecosystems we are as likely to encounter Schubert as we are “a hand of violets,” Isaac Newton as a “winged quail on turf.” Nothing escapes Macdonald’s eye and every creature herein—from the smallest bird to the loftiest thinker—holds a significant place in her poems. “Macdonald is a poet of vision and sound, oracular one moment and playful the next, whose first love and only loyalty is to the music of words.” –O, the Oprah Magazine

Vesper Flights

Author: Helen Macdonald
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802146694
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
The New York Times–bestselling author of H is for Hawk explores the human relationship to the natural world in this “dazzling” essay collection (Wall Street Journal). In Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing the massive migration of songbirds from the top of the Empire State Building, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk’s poplar forests. She writes with heart-tugging clarity about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds’ nests, and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife.

Featherhood

Author: Charlie Gilmour
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 1501198505
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
“I loved every single page.” —Elton John “The best piece of nature writing since H is for Hawk.” —Neil Gaiman In this moving, critically acclaimed memoir, a young man saves a baby magpie as his estranged father is dying, only to find that caring for the mischievous bird saves him. One spring day, a baby magpie falls out of its nest and into Charlie Gilmour’s hands. Magpies, he soon discovers, are as clever and mischievous as monkeys. They are also notorious thieves, and this one quickly steals his heart. By the time the creature develops shiny black feathers that inspire the name Benzene, Charlie and the bird have forged an unbreakable bond. While caring for Benzene, Charlie learns his biological father, an eccentric British poet named Heathcote Williams who vanished when Charlie was six months old, is ill. As he grapples with Heathcote’s abandonment, Charlie comes across one of his poems, in which Heathcote describes how an impish young jackdaw fell from its nest and captured his affection. Over time, Benzene helps Charlie unravel his fears about repeating the past—and embrace the role of father himself. A bird falls, a father dies, a child is born. Featherhood is the unforgettable story of a love affair between a man and a bird. It is also a beautiful and affecting memoir about childhood and parenthood, captivity and freedom, grief and love.

Falcon

Author: Helen Macdonald
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780236891
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
Before best-selling author Helen Macdonald told the story of the goshawk in H Is for Hawk, she told the story of the falcon, in a cultural history of the masterful creature that can “cut the sky in two” with the “perfectly aerodynamic profile of a raindrop,” as she so incisively puts it. In talon-sharp prose she explores the spell the falcon has had over her and, by extension, all of us, whether we’ve seen them “through binoculars, framed on gallery walls, versified by poets, flown as hunting birds, through Manhattan windows, sewn on flags, stamped on badges, or winnowing through the clouds over abandoned arctic radar stations.” Macdonald dives through centuries and careens around the globe to tell the story of the falcon as it has flown in the wild skies of the natural world and those of our imagination. Mixing history, myth, and legend, she explores the long history of the sport of falconry in many human cultures—from Japan to Abu Dhabi to Oxford; she analyzes the falcon’s talismanic power as a symbol in art, politics, and business; and she addresses the ways we have both endangered and protected it. Along the way we discover how falcons were mobilized in secret military projects; their links with espionage, the Third Reich, the Holy Roman Empire, and space programs; and how they have figured in countless stories of heroism and, of course, the erotic. Best of all, Macdonald has given us something fresh: a new introduction that draws on all her experience to even further invigorate her cherished subject. The result is a deeply informed book written with the same astonishing lyrical grace that has captivated readers and had everyone talking about this writer-cum-falconer.

A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings

Author: Helen Jukes
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501766554
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings begins as Helen Jukes is entering her thirties and struggling to settle into her new job and home. Then friends gift her a colony of honeybees—a gift that, according to folklore, brings good luck—and Jukes embarks on the rewarding, perilous journey of becoming a beekeeper. Jukes writes about what it means to "keep" wild creatures and to live alongside beings whose laws of life are so different from our own. She delves into the history of beekeeping, exploring the ancient—and sometimes disturbing—relationship between keeper and bee, human and wild thing. And as her colony grows, the very act of beekeeping seems to open new perspectives, making her world come alive again. A beautifully wrought meditation on uncertainty and hope, feelings of restlessness and home, and how we might better know ourselves, A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings shows us how to be alert to these small creatures flitting among us that are yet so vital a force for the continuation of life.

Dadland

Author: Keggie Carew
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802190383
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Book Description
As her father’s memory fails, a daughter explores his military past: “Part family memoir, part history book . . . Compelling and moving from start to finish” (Financial Times). One of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Ten Best Books of the Year For most of Keggie Carew’s life, she was kept at arm’s length from her father’s personal history. But when she is invited to join him for the sixtieth anniversary of the Jedburghs—an elite special operations unit that was the first collaboration between the American and British Secret Services during World War II—a new door opens in their relationship. As dementia begins to stake a claim over Tom Carew’s memory, Keggie embarks on a quest to unravel his story, and soon finds herself in a far more consuming place than she bargained for. Tom Carew was a maverick, a left-handed stutterer, a law unto himself. As a Jedburgh he parachuted behind enemy lines to raise guerrilla resistance first against the Germans in France, then against the Japanese in Southeast Asia, where he won the nickname “Lawrence of Burma.” But his wartime exploits were only the beginning. A winner of the Costa Book Award, Dadland takes us on a journey through peace and war and shady corners of twentieth-century politics; though the author’s English childhood and the breakdown of her family, and into the mysterious realm of memory. “Brings to mind Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk in the way it soars off in surprising directions, teaches you things you didn’t know, and ambushes your emotions.” ―NPR “Astonishing . . . Mixes intimate memoir, biography, history and detective story: this is a shape-shifting hybrid that meditates on the nature of time and identity . . . Tom Carew was a razzle-dazzle character, larger than life and anarchically self-invented . . . For all its vigor and comic zest, Dadland is a careful and tender discovery that patiently circles around a man who spent his life mythologizing and running away from himself.” ―The Observer

H is for Hawkeye

Author: Patricia A. Pierce
Publisher: Sleeping Bear Press
ISBN: 1585366935
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 42

Book Description
Did you know the Hawkeye State got its nickname from Chief Black Hawk of the Sauk tribe? Or that D is for Des Moines, the capital with the golden dome? Or that Iowa is bordered on each side by navigable rivers, the Missouri marks the western border and the Mississippi forms its eastern border. H is for Hawkeye presents these and many other interesting facts about the great state of Iowa.