By spending his childhood spotting and recording details of planes, he honed the observational skills and patience that would serve him well in his future career as a photojournalist.īroken by grief and a deep sense of emptiness, Helen Macdonald latches on to the one passion she believes may help her fill the void left by the loss of her father: a quest to raise and train a young goshawk. Her father, a press photographer by profession, grew up watching birds of a different kind. Helen, a watcher by nature, is fascinated by birds of prey and an experienced trainer of falcons. Throughout her life, she has looked up to her dad with the two Macdonalds sharing several qualities and personality traits. When Helen Macdonald, a Cambridge historian, writer and illustrator, loses her father to a heart attack, she is devastated. An ingenious blend of memoir and nature writing, an intelligent, multi-layered and humane work, H is for Hawk is one of my favourite books of the year. H is for Hawk is one of those rare books that come along every so often that have the potential to resonate with many readers, perhaps even changing their outlook on life in some small way. It was a solid thing you could press yourself against and feel it push back a thick fluid, half-air, half-glass, that flowed both ways and sent ripples of recollection forwards and new events backwards so that new things I encountered, then, seemed souvenirs from the distant past.
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