H Is for Hawk
by Helen Macdonald · first published 2006
63% recommend25% neutral13% critical
Why HN recommends it
Memoir braiding grief after a father's death with the author's year training a goshawk, plus a look back at T.H. White's falconry story; recommended for its nature writing and for fans of Watership Down.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
When Helen Macdonald's father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer, Helen had never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators, the goshawk, but in her grief, she saw that the goshawk's fierce and feral temperament mirrored her own. Resolving to purchase and raise the deadly creature as a means to cope with her loss, she adopted Mabel, and turned to the guidance of The Once and Future King author T.H. White's chronicle The Goshawk to begin her challenging endeavor. Projecting herself "in the hawk's wild mind to tame her" tested the l
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…of my favorites from 2021: * East of Eden by John Steinbeck. Steinbeck beautifully captures and shares the culture of old America through the lives of two families that become interwoven over time. * H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. Macdonald's book is part auto-biography (dealing with depression), part biography on T. H. White (of Sword in the Stone's fame), and lightly part guide on caring for hawks. * The…
on “Ask HN: Great Books from your 2021 Reading List?” ↗…coming from outside the Western perspective. It's one of a trilogy: The Dark Forest english translation is out, and Death's End is coming beginning of next year. Also enjoyed Seveneves by Stephenson, and H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. The former is likely known to the HN crowd; the latter draws comparisons to T.H. White's classic The Goshawk. Among non-fiction books, I enjoyed The Little Prover by Friedman and…
on “Ask HN: Best books you've read in 2015” ↗If you like Watership Down I don't think I can recommend enough H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. While the books are very different, one is a novel the other is a memoir they both touch on nature, death, life in beautifully similar ways.
on “Revisited: Watership Down” ↗I finished _H is for Hawk_ last week. Good stuff, but I admit feeling pain over the way TH White's skin is flayed out for all the world to see. I'd rather think of him as an ignorant would-be falconer, guided by an ancient book…
on “How to Train Your Raptor” ↗H for Hawk, mentioned here, made me fall in love with the idea and at the same time, know that I should never have a falcon. Intense commitment. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H_is_for_Hawk
on “A day with the squirrel hawkers of East Texas” ↗H is for Hawk: I gave up reading this book about halfway through. It drags out a lot with needless fluff; she spent about 3 pages just naming the bird! She seemed to really hate T.H. White's 'The Goshawk' so I decided…
on “YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List” ↗I read something about this in a quite unexpected place: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald: > A few years ago I met a retired U2 pilot ... as I talked with this man what impressed me the most weren't his deadpan tales of high adventure, the 'incidents' with Russian MiGs…
on “Northern Lights as seen from inside a U2 spy plane” ↗…existentialism. "Life has no prescribed inherent meaning, it is whatever you want it to be!" seemed very freeing. Then I suffered a disability and came upon the realization similar to Helen Macdonalds, in H is for Hawk: "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…
on “Ask HN: What's the Point of Life?” ↗