The author trails her wild alter ego and like a God of mercy feels compelled to twist the necks of the quarry that Mabel has attacked but not yet murdered. Macdonald teaches the bird to land on her wrist and mind her commands, and she monitors the hawk’s pursuit of hares and pheasants. Mabel, the goshawk, is “bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier” than the garden-variety hawk. So much of H is for Hawk is eminently quotable. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.” I read a lot of this book on Kindle and was not surprised to see many passages underlined by other appreciative readers. It is more like earth under spade, turning up things you had forgotten. About the stages of mourning, she writes, “The archaeology of grief is not ordered. Macdonald, however, is a remarkably gritty writer with a keen awareness of the psychological conundrums that bedevil us more common folk. Academics tend to write in a clotted, complex style better suited to highbrow journals. Quite unselfconsciously, as the author writes about acquiring and training a goshawk, she evolves into fascinating and compelling narrator.ĭespite the fact that this book has become a best seller in the UK, Macdonald has continued to work as a research scholar of history at Cambridge.

This is a fascinating pastime, with its own lexicon of evocative terms such as “bating”: when a hawk or falcon nervously or aggressively flaps its wings. In addition to participating in the profound grief that the writer feels for her deceased father, we learn about the age-old profession of falconry. The lovely, beguiling H is for Hawk is a notable exception to the genre. So whenever I find Proustian recall in a memoir, I suspect that the book is larded with imagined details and events. Memoirs are supposed to be true they should not be fueled by the writer’s invention. From my point of view, most contemporary memoirs are the reality TV of modern literature. To afford that luxury, I’d have to kill off millions of readers who are hungry for tales of sadness, bottoming out and ultimate redemption. I recently wrote a blog post saying that I’d grown weary of reading memoirs about dying-dead-or-dysfunctional parents and wish these tomes would just fade away.

Author of h is for hawk