Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

What the H?

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

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Recently named one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by the New York Times, Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk covers one year in the author’s life. After the death of her father, Helen purchases and trains a goshawk to give her something to focus on in her grief. While recounting that process, she also diverges into discussions about the life of the author T.H. White, who in addition to writing The Once and Future King, was also a falconer. I listened […]

Philosophy, nature, and ecology

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

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Just over a year ago, I stumbled into birdwatching, and it has stuck with me. I feel like I’ve discovered  a whole new world that was right under my nose my entire life; I just wasn’t looking. So, when I saw a bird on the cover of Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald on NPR’s Best Books of 2020, I was eager to read it. Vesper Flights is a collection of essays by Macdonald. They all explore the connection between humans and the natural world. There are a number of references […]

The World Does Not Belong to Us Alone

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

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In this collection of 41 essays Helen Macdonald writes about a wide variety of subjects concerning nature and the way humans relate to it, ranging from a solar eclipse and migrating birds to migraines and mushrooms. This landed on my TBR list when I read this review by KimMiE” which made me curious about the book. I am glad that I followed her advice and read it slowly over several weeks, one essay at a time, because I don’t think I would have enjoyed it […]

Musings on nature and a bit of tranquility

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

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As a fan of Helen Macdonald’s lovely memoir H is for Hawk, I was happy to receive Vesper Flights, a collection of her new and previously published essays, for Christmas. If you have read any of Macdonald’s work, you will know that she is an acutely personal writer, connecting her thoughts about nature to deeper personal feelings, and even modern issues and current events. Vesper Flights comprises 41 individual essays, so if you want to dip your toe into Macdonald’s writing, and maybe generate a […]

Channeling Tim Gunn…

H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald

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… but this felt like student work to me. It’s another book I just didn’t get the hype over, even if I enjoyed quite a lot about it. The blending of the three stories just never gelled for me. I think that the crossover between T.H. White’s experience training a goshawk and MacDonald’s could have sustained a book, and that training a goshawk while mourning one’s father could have, but the three together made the book feel disjointed to me. I kind of wish that […]

‘Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.’

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When Helen Macdonald lost her father unexpectedly, a man whom she loved and admired very much, she went a little crazy. She’d always been obsessed with falconry, and so she decided (rather spur-of-the-moment) to get a goshawk and train it. A lot of her inspiration came from T. H. White’s The Goshawk, a book that she read as a child — and hated because she felt that White didn’t know what he was doing. “When you are broken, you run. But you don’t always run away. […]



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