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3.82 AVERAGE
3.82 AVERAGE
Macdonald's book delights in part because it defies genre.
The book describes her complex relationship with a goshawk she is training to hunt. She describes the bird's body movements, its hunting grounds, its prey and other aspects of the sport--or rather the art of falconry. However, the book is far more than a nature book. The catalyst for procuring the Hawk is her father's sudden death. She's processing her grief while immersing herself in the world of falconry. From time to time, she shares stories about her father, but more often she describes her grief, the physical and psychological distress.
Despite Macdonald's ability describe wildness to the point where she seems more animal than human at times, she invokes quite a bit of civilization. Even as a child, she read voraciously about falconry. She draws from hobbyist magazines, monographs, and historical records (some dating back hundreds of years). She gestures to symbols for hawks and other birds of prey used in artwork from a variety of time periods and cultures. I was surprised to discover that the most frequently invoked cultural object is the British author.
About a fifth of the book is focused on the life and writings of T. H. White. While Macdonald does discuss his life and career broadly in a few places, for the more part, she does a close reading of White's book _The Goshawk_ (1954). Macdonald read White's book about training a hawk when she was a school-aged girl. After she loses her father and gains a goshawk of her own, she rereads _The Goshawk_ with great care, noting White's misguided techniques and describing possible deep psychological motivations for his goal, methods and reactions to the act of training his goshawk.
One of the most powerful aspects of the book is the complex dialectic Macdonald describes between nature and civilization, symbolized most pointedly in the relationship between hawk and falconer. Does the bird become more human when trained? Does the human become more wild? Can a human being observe nature without the filter of civilization? Or are people doomed to always overlay templates from art, history, literature, culture, or even personal psychological needs--rending it impossible to live purely in a state of nature?
These are interesting questions, ones that she addresses overtly while discussing White but also questions she poses to herself and her relationship with her goshawk. Hint: there are no easy answers to the question of how nature and civilization creates a commerce of action and meaning.
Like other reviewers, I did at times worry about Macdonald's psychological state. She describes several moments of extreme distress--she withdraws from others, eats poorly, sleeps little, falls into financial difficulty, pushes herself too far while going on long hunts or physically challenging hunts. She falls into fuzzy thinking and antisocial behavior. However, I never grew too concerned. Afterall, I was holding her finished book in my hand the entire time. And it takes a lot of discipline and focus to produce a book. I had concrete evidence that she pulled through.
The writing style itself is evidence of strength and resilience. Macdonald has a powerful imagination and a lyric writing style. She demonstrates a great deal of intrapersonal intelligence (see Howard Gardner). Because she can observe her own thoughts and feelings with such intensity and nuance, I at times felt as though her grief was magnified. She was able to dramatize and explain in painstacking detail her thoughts and feelings. This might have increased her own suffering, but her ability to verbalize her grief process will certainly serve to guide and comfort other bereft people. It can also help readers offer compassion to those who are grieving.
Even though she does not describe her own writing process, I kept imagining her reclusive time being filled in part with faithful journal keeping. Her time with the goshawk is so thoroughly described, she much have been writing frequently.
So, yes, the hawk helped her process her grief, but the act of writing itself keeps her teathered to the world, helped her hold on to the sanity required for forming words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters. In writing this book, she was able to exert control over a world that turned to chaos when her dad died. And out of that chaos, she created something beautiful and powerful to offer the world.
The book describes her complex relationship with a goshawk she is training to hunt. She describes the bird's body movements, its hunting grounds, its prey and other aspects of the sport--or rather the art of falconry. However, the book is far more than a nature book. The catalyst for procuring the Hawk is her father's sudden death. She's processing her grief while immersing herself in the world of falconry. From time to time, she shares stories about her father, but more often she describes her grief, the physical and psychological distress.
Despite Macdonald's ability describe wildness to the point where she seems more animal than human at times, she invokes quite a bit of civilization. Even as a child, she read voraciously about falconry. She draws from hobbyist magazines, monographs, and historical records (some dating back hundreds of years). She gestures to symbols for hawks and other birds of prey used in artwork from a variety of time periods and cultures. I was surprised to discover that the most frequently invoked cultural object is the British author.
About a fifth of the book is focused on the life and writings of T. H. White. While Macdonald does discuss his life and career broadly in a few places, for the more part, she does a close reading of White's book _The Goshawk_ (1954). Macdonald read White's book about training a hawk when she was a school-aged girl. After she loses her father and gains a goshawk of her own, she rereads _The Goshawk_ with great care, noting White's misguided techniques and describing possible deep psychological motivations for his goal, methods and reactions to the act of training his goshawk.
One of the most powerful aspects of the book is the complex dialectic Macdonald describes between nature and civilization, symbolized most pointedly in the relationship between hawk and falconer. Does the bird become more human when trained? Does the human become more wild? Can a human being observe nature without the filter of civilization? Or are people doomed to always overlay templates from art, history, literature, culture, or even personal psychological needs--rending it impossible to live purely in a state of nature?
These are interesting questions, ones that she addresses overtly while discussing White but also questions she poses to herself and her relationship with her goshawk. Hint: there are no easy answers to the question of how nature and civilization creates a commerce of action and meaning.
Like other reviewers, I did at times worry about Macdonald's psychological state. She describes several moments of extreme distress--she withdraws from others, eats poorly, sleeps little, falls into financial difficulty, pushes herself too far while going on long hunts or physically challenging hunts. She falls into fuzzy thinking and antisocial behavior. However, I never grew too concerned. Afterall, I was holding her finished book in my hand the entire time. And it takes a lot of discipline and focus to produce a book. I had concrete evidence that she pulled through.
The writing style itself is evidence of strength and resilience. Macdonald has a powerful imagination and a lyric writing style. She demonstrates a great deal of intrapersonal intelligence (see Howard Gardner). Because she can observe her own thoughts and feelings with such intensity and nuance, I at times felt as though her grief was magnified. She was able to dramatize and explain in painstacking detail her thoughts and feelings. This might have increased her own suffering, but her ability to verbalize her grief process will certainly serve to guide and comfort other bereft people. It can also help readers offer compassion to those who are grieving.
Even though she does not describe her own writing process, I kept imagining her reclusive time being filled in part with faithful journal keeping. Her time with the goshawk is so thoroughly described, she much have been writing frequently.
So, yes, the hawk helped her process her grief, but the act of writing itself keeps her teathered to the world, helped her hold on to the sanity required for forming words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters. In writing this book, she was able to exert control over a world that turned to chaos when her dad died. And out of that chaos, she created something beautiful and powerful to offer the world.
She is a very talented writer whose story I wasn’t interested in. Idk, maybe I’m callous but the relationship between the hawk and the author interested me less than that of some of the historic people she referenced, and we also didn’t learn all that much about her father, which caused a bit of a disconnect for me.
dark
reflective
sad
slow-paced
I grabbed the audio book of this have heard the title a few times and thinking it was a popular nature book. i didn't read the description to see that grief is a major subject, so I wasn't expecting that. but it was good. i am now curious about T. H. White and considering reading his biography.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Grief, Death of parent, Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Bullying, Child abuse, Mental illness, Blood
Minor: Pedophilia, Xenophobia
It was not a quick read because MacDonald’s sentences require savoring. It was not strictly a memoir nor a literary biography nor a nature book. It was, to me, a beautifully-written meditation on our shared experiences through space and time. I’m curious to read more of MacDonald’s work now.
emotional
reflective
sad
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Blood, Death of parent
reflective
slow-paced
geniusly and creatively written, thought provoking and philosophical
It's been almost a year since my father died and since that day I've found myself struggling to find words that capture my feelings of loss and grief. Reading, words, and language have always been a big part of my inner life, and I've found myself feeling more introverted as I try to sift through the words that explain this process. An 'unmooring' or an 'unrooting' are the closest words I've found to describe the loss of a parent.
Macdonald has a beautiful use of language to describe what humans have long struggled to explain. She pulls from nature and, more specifically, the taming of a goshawk, after the unexpected death of her father. I think I could read this book again and highlight the passages that, in explaining what I've felt, gave me comfort. Some say the purpose of reading and literature is to cure loneliness - for me, it has been a loneliness of a particular emotion - no one else had the same relationship with my father, but in Macdonald's words I found a kinship.
A passage: There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.
Macdonald has a beautiful use of language to describe what humans have long struggled to explain. She pulls from nature and, more specifically, the taming of a goshawk, after the unexpected death of her father. I think I could read this book again and highlight the passages that, in explaining what I've felt, gave me comfort. Some say the purpose of reading and literature is to cure loneliness - for me, it has been a loneliness of a particular emotion - no one else had the same relationship with my father, but in Macdonald's words I found a kinship.
A passage: There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.
A pure coincidence that I started volunteering at the RSPCA bird ward in oz after falling in love with the falconing experience I had in England. This book was made for me. I loved this book. I loved Mabel. I loved the authors slow but determined recovery and frustrations with Mabel. I didn't know much about the author she referenced throughout and skimmed a couple of sections... Loved the core of the narrative. This book deserves every plaudit it's received so far.
Boooooooring. But maybe I would have liked it better if I had experience with the kind of grief discussed in this book. The hawk info was cool. Probably wouldn’t have made it through without the audio.
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
sad
medium-paced