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kisaly's review against another edition
4.0
3.5 stars. White's descriptions of the birds and training process are beautiful and evocative. On the flipside, he doesn't seem to be all that good at his newfound hobby, to the detriment of the animals, and the occasional casual sexism was annoying and a bit baffling in a book that is literally not even supposed to be about people.
softstarrynights's review against another edition
3.0
T.H. White is probably best known as the author of the Arthurian retelling The Once and Future King. This is a departure from fantasy with a memoir of White's experience training a goshawk using a 17th-century falconry guide. I find this one difficult to rate because I don't read a lot of non-fiction, and I've never read nature writing, so I struggle to compare to other works and authors. I enjoyed the parts where Gos, the goshawk, was being trained but these moments are surprisingly sparse. The Goshawk also feels as though it's a book for White more than anyone else, which is understandable as the daybook it is based on was not written with the intention to publish. It's a short book, so it is a quick read which worked in its favour but I'm not sure it's the sort of thing I will still be thinking about next month.
grubstlodger's review against another edition
4.0
I’m a love a bit of TH White. ‘The Once and Future King’ series, ‘Mistress Masham’s Repose’ and his ‘Bestiary’ are some of favourite books. They had a warmth and humanity which were utterly entrancing. However, ‘The Master’, ‘The Age of Scandal’ and ‘Scandalmonger’ were nasty, bitter, misanthropic things. ‘The Goshawk’ was a heady mix of White at his worst and best.
After giving up his work as a schoolteacher and living as a hermit in the woods, White decided to unite his need to earn money and eat with his other need to challenge himself and learn new things. With a small collection of vastly outdated books on the art of the austringer, he orders Gos the goshawk from Germany and proceeds to undergo a brutal training regime that involves breaking the bird by depriving it of sleep, a process which requires him to have no sleep either. Who will be broken first?
White’s love of Gos is an odd one. First, there is a motherly sort of love - he logs to raise and care for the bird as a parent. Then he imagines it as a slave/master relationship but keeps swapping between who is the slave and who is the master. He admires Gos for his killer instinct, praises him as a psychotic assassin, yet is extremely fearful and resentful about war and the growing fascist powers (it is 1937 after all). He also hates Gos for his untrainability, pities him for his anger and spews internal invective at the bird a number of times.
Because the book is spun from the notes he was writing as he was going through the sleep deprivation, there is a peculiar feverish quality to the whole thing. Often he represents himself in the third person, describing himself as the ‘austringer’ but other times as a zombie or Frankenstein’s monster. It has this peculiar quality of someone analysing themselves from the outside but also has a slightly self-hating quality.
His writing of the countryside was very evocative to this city kid and borrowed enough of what I knew about rural places to help me picture it. I also liked how, because he only had vastly outdated texts, he put himself into the role of the historical hawkers - his hawk-training providing deeper and more interesting readings of the past, Shakespeare in particular, although I also found out that TH White was an anti-Stratfordian - yuck! The afterword, from fifteen years later, tells us about some of the advancements in hawking and it provided a slightly funny, but mostly tragic element of irony when considering all the struggle that proceeded it.
White seems at all times to be torn between love and loathing. His books seem to come from one of those sides or the other. His loathing is more sickly and unpleasant because they spring from the soured love, but his love is stronger for it’s overcoming of the loathing. I’ll certainly be reading his biography soon as I am reminded what a fascinating and complicated (if not often likeable) man TH White was.
After giving up his work as a schoolteacher and living as a hermit in the woods, White decided to unite his need to earn money and eat with his other need to challenge himself and learn new things. With a small collection of vastly outdated books on the art of the austringer, he orders Gos the goshawk from Germany and proceeds to undergo a brutal training regime that involves breaking the bird by depriving it of sleep, a process which requires him to have no sleep either. Who will be broken first?
White’s love of Gos is an odd one. First, there is a motherly sort of love - he logs to raise and care for the bird as a parent. Then he imagines it as a slave/master relationship but keeps swapping between who is the slave and who is the master. He admires Gos for his killer instinct, praises him as a psychotic assassin, yet is extremely fearful and resentful about war and the growing fascist powers (it is 1937 after all). He also hates Gos for his untrainability, pities him for his anger and spews internal invective at the bird a number of times.
Because the book is spun from the notes he was writing as he was going through the sleep deprivation, there is a peculiar feverish quality to the whole thing. Often he represents himself in the third person, describing himself as the ‘austringer’ but other times as a zombie or Frankenstein’s monster. It has this peculiar quality of someone analysing themselves from the outside but also has a slightly self-hating quality.
His writing of the countryside was very evocative to this city kid and borrowed enough of what I knew about rural places to help me picture it. I also liked how, because he only had vastly outdated texts, he put himself into the role of the historical hawkers - his hawk-training providing deeper and more interesting readings of the past, Shakespeare in particular, although I also found out that TH White was an anti-Stratfordian - yuck! The afterword, from fifteen years later, tells us about some of the advancements in hawking and it provided a slightly funny, but mostly tragic element of irony when considering all the struggle that proceeded it.
White seems at all times to be torn between love and loathing. His books seem to come from one of those sides or the other. His loathing is more sickly and unpleasant because they spring from the soured love, but his love is stronger for it’s overcoming of the loathing. I’ll certainly be reading his biography soon as I am reminded what a fascinating and complicated (if not often likeable) man TH White was.
tonybz's review against another edition
4.0
Such poetic descriptions of nature in the daily record of training a hawk in the misguided following of a guidebook dating to the Renaissance. A parallel to Thoreau’s diary without the posturing.
novelsandnature's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
3.0
Loved the inclusion of diagrams of falconry equipment and different things which most people do not know about
raptorsandprey's review against another edition
2.0
I'm not convinced at all. White justifies his failures by claiming that Edmund Bert's account on falconry published in 1619 is outdated. This is only a poor excuse. The focus of falconry might have shifted over the centuries and methods have been developed to simplify the art. However, the underlying procedures of practical falconry are the same now as they were then. White's failures are not the result of following Bert's advice, they are rather caused by NOT sticking to them, which happens quite a lot throughout the book.
abby_writes's review against another edition
5.0
The Goshawk is a superb piece of jaunty nature writing in White’s very particular and often didactic voice that illuminates the interior struggles present in any close relationship via his misadventures training Gos. In many ways, The Goshawk was ahead of its time in the blending of nature, memoir, and learning an important lesson. Some moments made me laugh out loud, others made my heart skip a beat -- it's an immersive tale, for certain, filled with humanity and compassion. Also, at one point, he lets Gos ride on his bike handlebars to the pub, which is both charming and absurd.
caseyot's review against another edition
4.0
Picked this up on a whim (because I love The Once & Future King more than is really healthy), and enjoyed it far more than I expected to. Gos was such a character. Hawking/falconry is not really anything I've thought much about aside from mentions in medieval historical fiction or fantasy books, but all the details of the training the must go through in order to be 'broken' was utterly enthralling.