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3.82 AVERAGE
3.82 AVERAGE
A haunting story of how to grieve and what it means to be human.
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
lighthearted
reflective
sad
fast-paced
A great blend of memoir and history, Macdonald gets raw and emotional in the time after her father’s passing. I saw this recommended online and was glad I finally started it. An interesting look on grief and a new perspective on hawking.
emotional
sad
macdonald's prose is incredible, and her attention to and rendering of the details of her time with mabel are astonishing. this is a book that makes you want to pay attention, and that makes you feel along with it. macdonald's renderings of grief are similarly sharp— they plunge you into something deep and sad that is difficult to put into words. i was impressed also with macdonald's interrogation of human relationships to wildness, and the way she challenged the vast history of falconry in her remarkable attention to interspecies relationships.
The finest memoirists are those who can take the most niche subjects and turn them into something universal. Helen Macdonald does this ten times over in H is for Hawk, and I'm still reeling from the beauty of it. The audio, which she reads, holds a subtle magic. Macdonald writes of grief and obsession and the specificity of losing a loved one in such a way that it feels deeply personal to whoever is reading it. She was so vulnerable in her writing and characterization of herself at that time and I rode those emotions with her. I empathized with her, I became frustrated by her, and I felt close to her by the end of it. I also am now more intrigued by T.H. White than I ever thought I would be, and the way she wove his history into her own was a fascinating layer that made the book all the more interesting. Her prose is poetic and moving, and the keen eye which grief grants made the world we live in one of magic and mystery. I would recommend this to anyone who loves beautiful things.
This was a well-written, interesting memoir, but it never quite hit home with me. Much of the book is about TH White who wrote "The Once and Future King" and I haven't read it and don't know much about White. In terms of memoirs of grieving, I liked Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking a lot more. It turns out that I don't care much about hawks either. I don't think it's a requirement to like White or hawks, but I'm sure it helps.
Honestly I was hoping that this book paid more attention to the ecology of hawks in the British landscape than it did, and I found the centrality of TS White to the narrative rather boring. I did, however, appreciate Macdonald's examination, deconstruction, and rejection of the mythical "Old England" narrative and the way that falconry has been used to reinforce and defend it and its cousin Aryan nationalism.
This book is…..BORING.
Read it because it was on my shelf and make the NYT 100 list. Can’t figure out why and that’s probably my fault, but it is so so so boring.
Read it because it was on my shelf and make the NYT 100 list. Can’t figure out why and that’s probably my fault, but it is so so so boring.
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced