Name: H Is for Hawk
ISBN: 9781481530958

H Is for Hawk

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 limits of Macdonald's humanity and changed her life.

What Hacker News says

eezurrFeb 2022

Did you read any interesting novels or books last year? Please share them with us. Some 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 Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov. This was actually a repeat read for me after 7+ years of my first read through. Two new foundations are created to save the milky way galaxy from 30,000 years of war and anarchy after the fall of the galactic empire. Their goal is to limit that period to 1,000 years.

This post is inspired from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17513576

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telesillaOct 2021

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

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neadenNov 2017

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.

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OopsCriticalityNov 2015

I'm cheating a little on the date, but The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin stands out. It was translated into english late last year, and received the Hugo this year for best story. It's wonderful sci-fi written on a grand scale, and made all the more interesting and refreshing to me by 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 Eastlund. It was exactly what I expected, a gentle introduction into inductive proofs in the idiom established by The Little Schemer.

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fallinghawksMar 2015

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 that told him nothing about how to achieve a responsive hawk. (_The Goshawk_ is depressing -- it's about everything a falconer should not do -- but he does succeed in the end, so there's hope.) I'm less interested in his sadism or pedophilia or the gyrating frustration White may have felt in not being able to express both and still be a decent person in his mind.

BTW, is this appropriate for Hacker News?

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_game_of_lifeOct 2021

When I was younger I was a big fan of 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 of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, [...]"

In an effort to adapt to this, I clung to stoicist philosophy. Life is to be weathered, through the development of virtues, and above all else--realizing what you have control over, and what you do not.

Upon becoming homeless, I realized this wise and practical branch of philosophy had not exactly delivered on it's promises. You cannot be destitute, sick, and isolated, and still manage to be happy, despite Stoicist claims to the contrary. This branch of philosophy oddly seems entitled to me now--little wonder it grew popular with intelligentsia, emperors, and now tech CEOs. I grew to far prefer its philosophical progenitor, Cynicism.

For this phase of my life, Albert Camus resonates and brings comfort. Life is absurd. The challenge is not to unravel or create meaning for life, but to image personal happiness in a stochastic world that defies explanation (though some such explanation may indeed exist, it is certainly absurd to human minds. I envy the dismissive confidence of those that proclaim "no point!")

This philosophy has served me far better than the others, though who knows what will come in the twilight of my life. Life is strange, fellow travelers.

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