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
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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
"One of the great pleasures in this collection of pieces is seeing how determinedly [Macdonald] picks away at conundrums first encountered in H Is for Hawk, her hugely successful memoir of 2014 ..."
"she uses her expertise in this book to help us not just learn but think about things in a new way, and invoke a sense of wonder ..."
"For its wry self-deprecation, Vesper Flights is a book thick with sorrow, an elegy in the midst of the sixth great extinction underway ..."
"And her pleasure of her prose — clear, tart, understated but regularly exploding into brilliance ..."
"For all its elegiac sentences and gray moods, Vesper Flights is a book of tremendous purpose."
"The descriptive range is sweeping ..."
"She writes that 'none of us sees animals clearly', but her beautifully written essays go a long way to improving our perception."
"The poet in Macdonald moves these subjects toward mystery ..."
"No longer confined to a single grief or creature, Macdonald's fascination with the natural world ranges from the habits of cuckoos and glowworms to the biodiversity of trees."
"there is, in each of these essays, a clear sense of the sensibility that is doing the looking: patient, alert, learned and excitable ..."
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