Vesper Flights
by
98/99
Critics' Rating Index
74/99
Readers' Rating Index
85/99
Scholars' Citation Index
99/99
Volume of Reviews
84/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
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About This Book
Animals don't exist in order to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. Helen Macdonald's bestselling debut H is for Hawk brought the astonishing story of her relationship with goshawk Mabel to global critical acclaim and announced Macdonald as one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers. H is for Hawk won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction and the Costa Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, launching poet and falconer Macdonald as our preeminent nature essayist, with a semi-regular column in the New York Times Magazine. In Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing songbirds from the Empire State Building as they migrate through the Tribute of Light, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests. She writes with heart-tugging clarity about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds' nests, and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife. By one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers, Vesper Flights is a captivating and foundational book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make sense of the world around us.
Reviews
"Macdonald makes us see that the love and pride that disenfranchised people lavish on their captive birds is as fierce and contradictory as that of a squire surveying his mallards through binoculars."
"These are the very paradoxes of Macdonald's prose—its lightness and force ..."
"Macdonald mines a rich seam of scientific research and field observation, and the essays are packed with detail ..."
"She takes her essays to unexpected places, but it never feels forced ..."
"Helen Macdonald set the bar high with H Is for Hawk; with Vesper Flights, she still soars into the ether."
"Macdonald moves easily from these deeply personal, spiritual associations to realms of scientific rigor, seeking certainty in the hard evidence of how things work ..."
"In Macdonald's case, it's between her almost religious belief in the otherness of animals and her own lifelong desire to find significance in that otherness, to seek lessons that pertain to herself and to humanity ..."
"The essays are personal accounts involving observation, recollection and, above all, fascination ..."
"Macdonald is a glorious writer ..."
"But it needn't: in fact, as a selection of Macdonald's journalism and essays, it provides a series of short blasts of insightful, invigorating nature writing ..."
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