The History Book Club discussion

This is the glossary thread for the March BOTM selection - H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald.

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by Helen Macdonald

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Please try to give a watch on the main page of the site:

The 5x15 video

https://www.goodreads.com/videos/1310...

H is for Hawk is a memoir by British author Helen Macdonald. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book of the Year award among other honours.



Content:

H is for Hawk tells Macdonald's story of the year she spent training a northern goshawk in the wake of her father's death. Her father, Alisdair Macdonald, was a respected photojournalist who died suddenly of a heart attack in 2007. Having been a falconer for many years, she purchased a young goshawk to help her through the grieving process.

Reception

The book reached The Sunday Times best-seller list within two weeks of being published in July 2014.

In an interview with The Guardian, Macdonald said, "While the backbone of the book is a memoir about that year when I lost my father and trained a hawk, there are also other things tangled up in that story which are not memoir. There is the shadow biography of TH White, and a lot of nature-writing, too. I was trying to let these different genres speak to each other."

Judges of the Samuel Johnson Prize specifically highlighted that marriage of genres as one of the reasons for selecting H is for Hawk as the winner.

Television

In "H is for Hawk: A New Chapter", part of BBC's Natural World series in 2017, she trained a new goshawk chick.

Awards and honours

2014 Samuel Johnson Prize, winner
2014 Costa Book of the Year, winner
2014 Duff Cooper Prize, shortlist
2015 Thwaites Wainwright Prize, longlist
2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, shortlist
2016 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, winner

Source: Wikipedia

NYT Sunday Book Review:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/bo...

Nature on PBS

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/h-hawk...

Helen Macdonald on life after H is For Hawk and the joy of living alone at 47

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/work...

From the New Yorker

Rapt
Grieving with your goshawk

By Kathryn Schulz

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

H Is for Hawk
by Helen Macdonald

“Helen Macdonald’s beautiful and nearly feral book, H Is for Hawk, reminds us that excellent nature writing can lay bare some of the intimacies of the wild world as well. Her book is so good that, at times, it hurt me to read it. It draws blood, in ways that seem curative.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times

About The Book

One of the New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of the Year

A Best Book of the Year: TIME, NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, Miami Herald, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Star Tribune, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Slate, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot

When Helen Macdonald’s father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer—Helen had been captivated by hawks since childhood&mdashshe’d 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.

Heart-wrenching and humorous, this book is an unflinching account of bereavement and a unique look at the magnetism of an extraordinary beast, with a parallel examination of a legendary writer’s eccentric falconry. Obsession, madness, memory, myth, and history combine to achieve a distinctive blend of nature writing and memoir from an outstanding literary innovator.

H is for Hawk: How a hawk helped Helen Macdonald recover from grief

https://youtu.be/CV5ZK68OkEY

Understanding Falconry (1990, UK)

https://youtu.be/F_TBD1fTx0Q

Source: Youtube

I recommend everybody watch this - This woman is amazing - Jemima Parry Jones - she made the Falconry film above and is famous in this arena.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jemima_...

Jemima Parry Jones MBE - explains about The International Centre for Birds of Prey (ICBP)

The International Centre for Birds of Prey in Newent, Gloucestershire is situated on the site of the National Birds of Prey Centre. Owned and directed by Jemima Parry-Jones, it is a thriving and popular tourist attraction, offering daily flying demonstrations, as well as courses in falconry and photography

Link: https://youtu.be/0ayue6AUZxA

Training Birds of Prey

by Jemima Parry-Jones

Here she is now:



Jemima Parry-Jones

Animal Hero Award - Winner - 2017

As the daughter of world-renowned falconer Phillip Glasier, Jemima grew up with birds of prey and learned how to handle and communicate with them from an early age.

jemima1Aged 17, she helped her father set up the International Centre for Birds of Prey in Gloucestershire, the UK's first specialist collection of birds of prey, which she still runs 50 years later.

Following in her father's footsteps, Jemima is now Britain's leading authority on husbandry, welfare and conservation breeding of birds of prey.

The centre, meanwhile, now leads in the world in the number of raptor species bred in captivity, with more than 250 species including eagle owls, kites, buzzards and falcons and hawks of all types.

It also educates thousands of people every year about birds of prey and their value in the world, works on the rehabilitation of birds and shares its raptor knowledge and experience with conservation projects worldwide.

In 1999 scientists in India asked Jemima for help after the country's vulture population began mysteriously dying out.

Five years later, the cause was identified as an anti-inflammatory drug which had been given to 2.5 million cows in the country.

Over two decades more than 40 million vultures had died after eating the animals' carcasses, leading to five species of vulture in the country being listed as critically endangered.

Jemima devised a recovery programme, investigated safer drugs and designed breeding programmes in India and Nepal to help boost numbers and save the birds from extinction. She also trained local staff caring for sick vultures, organised artificial incubation and rearing facilities and taught them how to hatch and rear young.

The teams are now breeding 60 vultures a year and a release programme has just started in Nepal.

Her work has meant that the decline of the vultures has slowed, and even stablised in some parts of the two countries.

Jemima, 68, said: "We have had vultures at the centre for a long time, and over the years have developed a lot of expertise on the birds, so when the alarm was first raised we were asked to help.

"The vultures were declining at a horrific rate. We designed a system to look at why they were dying out, and when it was discovered, worked with spent a lot of time looking at which anti-inflammatory drugs could be used which would be safe for vultures.

"We identified one, and we're now doing tests to try to find another drug to give vets a second choice."

Jemima is now also working to stem the decline of vulture populations in African countries.

She said: "The problem there is very different, with many deaths because of a tribal custom to kill them.

"Many are also being killed by elephant poachers. Poachers don't want vultures circling the corpse to alert gamekeepers to where they are, so they deliberately poison them."

In South Africa, where many vultures are electrocuted after flying into electricity cables, Jemima is working with Escom, the main provider of electricity, to try to put flappers on overhead lines to make them visible for the birds.

Jemima said that she feels privileged to be able to work with birds of prey and help others to understand and protect them.

She said: "I'm fairly passionate about animals in general, but birds of prey have been my life since before I can remember.

"I love being able to share this passion with others and pass on the knowledge and expertise that the birds have given us."

Jemima, who received an MBE from the Queen for services to bird conservation, said that winning an Animal Heroes award is "amazing".

She said: "I'm not the sort of person who would be thinking I'd get an award, this is everyday life that I'm just getting on with. But to have it recognised by other people is very special, and most of all helps highlight the work we are doing and why it's so important."

http://www.animalheroawards.co.uk/con...

This is Jemima's late father Philip Glazier who is showing Prince Philip around in 1979

Note: A young Jemima is in the film too.

https://youtu.be/kIDVVdarrzM

Helen Macdonald on What Falconry Can Teach Us About Our Relationship With Raptors

http://www.audubon.org/news/helen-mac...

Source: Audubon

Helen Macdonald on Nature:

https://www.nytimes.com/column/on-nature

Source: New York Times Magazine

The Guardian Review:

H is for Hawk

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

What’s next for Helen Macdonald, author of ‘H is for Hawk’
By Sadie Dingfelder March 17, 2016

https://www.washingtonpost.com/expres...

Source: The Washington Post

Falconer and Author Helen Macdonald on Dialogue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2j5m...

Source: Youtube

I found this episode which is very well done:

BBC Natural World (2017) H is for Hawk A New Chapter

Link: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x68bk9b

Following the success of Helen Macdonald's bestselling novel of the same name, H is for Hawk: A New Chapter is an intimate and personal journey. After the loss of her father, Helen trained the hardest bird in falconry, a goshawk. The cathartic experience helped her to grieve and now she is ready to do it again, but this time she hopes it will be her wings to somewhere new. In this beautiful and moving film, Helen trains a new bird and follows a wild goshawk family at the nest, getting closer than ever before to these fiery eyed birds of prey.

Documentary
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09b68wy

The glossary is open.

Some books mentioned by the author: (Chapters 1 - 3)

by William Bray (no photo)

The Gentlemen's Recreation by Nicholas Cox - not in goodreads
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A34...

by Frank Illingworth (no photo)

by Gilbert Blaine (no photo)

by John G. Cu[author:T.H. Whitemmins|545137] (no photo)

Falconry by Philip Allan - not in goodreads

by Charles Hawkins Fisher (no photo)

by

Some books mentioned by the author: (Chapters 4 - 7)

(no image) Letter To A Friend Tr by T.H. White

by T.H. White

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

(no image) The White/Garnett Letters by David Garnett

by Henry Green

by T.H. White

by T.H. White

by Harriet Hall (no photo)

by Richard Blome (no photo)

by John le Carré

Some books mentioned by the author: (Chapters 8 - 12)

(no image) An Approved Treatise on Hawks & Hawking by Edmund Bert (no photo)

by John Keats

by E.B. Michell

by Humphrey Drummond/Ap Evans (no photo)

by Charles Hawkins Fisher (no photo)

by Gage Earle Freeman (no photo)

A Goshawk
VICKY KASALA PRODUCTIONS/GETTY IMAGES

This is the whole of the film 'The Goshawk'.

The Goshawk' - Entire Movie

Link: https://youtu.be/sb8aE0J_avw

Starring Duncan Carse as 'The Falconer' and a stunning goshawk
Based on the book 'The Goshawk' by T. H. White.
Created for the BBC in 1969
Produced and Directed by David Cobham
Copyright: David Cobham Productions.

Note: Some scenes with the Hawk hunting might not be for the most sensitive

Source: Youtube

Suggestions of some other books to read:

by T.H. White

by T.H. White

by T.H. White

by J.A. Baker

by Barry Hines

by Peter Matthiessen

by Howard Norman

by Olivia Gentile (no photo)