內容簡介
As a child, Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T.H. White's tortured masterpiece, "The Goshawk," which describes White's struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest.
When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals.
Destined to be a classic of nature writing, "H is for Hawk" is a record of a spiritual journey - an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming. At the same time, it's a kaleidoscopic biography of the brilliant and troubled novelist T. H. White, best known for "The Once and Future King." It's a book about memory, nature and nation, and how it might be possible to try to reconcile death with life and love.
作者介紹
Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, and naturalist. Before becoming a full-time writer, they worked in raptor research and conservation for many years, then became a historian of science, specialising in the history of natural history, ornithology, and animal behaviour. They are an Affiliated Research Scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. They are best known for the internationally bestselling and prize-winning memoir 'H Is for Hawk', the essay collection 'Vesper Flights', and have also written a cultural history of falcons 'Falcon', and three collections of poetry. Their most recent book is the novel 'Prophet' written in collaboration with Sin Blaché. Helen lives in Suffolk, England, with two parrots known as 'The Bugs."
