The Goshawk (New York Review Books Classics)

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It was the falconer’s duty to lift the hawk back to the fist with his other hand with gentleness and patience, only to have him bate again, once, twice, twenty, fifty times, all night…”.

All those elements of himself that he'd pushed away, his sexuality, his desire for cruelty, for mastery: all these were suddenly there in the figure of the hawk. I also liked the discussions of the weather, the descriptions of the English countryside and wildlife (very Colin Dann! This fascinating book is a day-to-day record of White's attempts to establish himself "Gos"'s eyes as an equal, a long, painful and emotionally wearing experience that sometimes involved the author's staying up night after night, talking to the bird, crooning to him, even reciting Shakespeare.I'm not about to go disinter White and slap a diagnosis on him (a diagnosis is only so good as it allows the impacted individual to better figure themselves out, and the constant interference from the state makes it extremely difficult to have any sort of proper discussion about that), but if you asked me what the tone of this entire piece is, 'special interest' goes a fair way in covering it. When the book was published in 1951, White added a third section with an overview of his continued practice with another goshawk, changes in method, and mention of the disappearance of the practice in England, but which he was glad to see continuing in America. White loves Gos for his wildness and killer instinct, while also recognizing that humanity can never survive on those terms. Mark Avery, from his blog Standing up for Nature * This timely book is a satisfying mix of page-turning action and thoughtful speculation . White, as he himself admits, does a lot of things wrong: feeding the bird far too much, for example.

You can read it as an investigation into the nature of freedom, of education, power, war, history, class, enslavement, the English landscape and the workings of the human heart… In our present age of terrible environmental destruction, it can be read most usefully as a book about humanity’s lamentable inability to see nature as anything other than a mirror of ourselves. He mentions in passing that, on a previous assignment, he was nearly killed by a female Harpy Eagle Harpia harpyja as he inspected a chick in her nest. Unfortunately goshawks are notoriously difficult to train, and White tries to do it all from textbooks; the project ends badly for both man and hawk.This was one of the books that I had to read for O-Level English literature, and it was the only really interesting one out of the set.

A feature of this book is its lack of index and bibliography, giving the sense that – a bit like a person in a hide, high in the canopy of a forest – it exists, appropriately perhaps for the times, in a bit of a bubble: self-contained, with little or no time for further reading. He is yet another member of the pantheon whose vague, undefined outsider status (I touched upon neurodivergency, but queerhood is apparently the big topic amongst the literati) makes me marvel at the conspiracy that first drew me to them in my unformed youth and again now that I am grown, and for better or worse, I am glad he had this small, singular happiness in his life, worn close to the vest while living and shared with those who seek it out now that he is gone. and train him per the methods of three textbooks: a volume of The Sportsman's Library, one of The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes, and the truly incredible Bert's Treatise of Hawks and Hawking, published 1619.Original unclipped dust wrapper is also smart with light shelf wear and the odd small closed tear to the extremities. After reading about shad, for example, I wonder at my reaction the next time I meet someone named 'Milt'. I speak here not of a country's or people's verbs, nouns and adjectives, but rather of the peculiar argot of a sport, hobby, or occupation. The only White I’ve read is The Sword in the Stone, but I really enjoyed it, and fairly recently too.

Rob Bijlsma, Netherlands * The challenges that birds of prey face are laid bare, but this is an upbeat book, one to lift the heart and give hope for the future.

I have a wild caught cockatoo that I have had for over 30 years (before it was illegal in NYS to have one) and training him was quite easy in comparison. Inside front cover very small green Foyles stamp and discrete owner's inscription dated 1952, otherwise 215 clean pages. Of course The Goshawk, first published in 1951, is timely because Macdonald wrote so perceptively about it in H is for Hawk. Dicevo quasi memoir perché comunque non lo è completamente, è molto più un libro sulla falconeria, ci sono parecchi particolari e disegni di attrezzatura per il rapace, trappole etc. Perhaps because his mistakes are always sending him back towards the starting point, perhaps because of the journal format with day following day with little obvious pattern, I could never measure how far White had come towards his goal.