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
"This is not the follow-up to Helen Macdonald's breakthrough book, H Is for Hawk and in that sense it may disappoint some of her readers."
"She crafts brilliant descriptions, drawing wisdom from her observations ..."
"...[a] radiant new essay collection ..."
"The essays are short, varied and highly edible, some only a page or two long."
"Sometimes, she suggests, like the swifts we must fly high to truly see ourselves and our world."
"Written in Macdonald's trademark piercing prose, these essays probe the author's fascination with the complexity, mystery, and magic of nature, including how we observe the world around us and make sense of our place within it ..."
"Macdonald is not, however, given to sounding dire, all-caps warnings ..."
"Macdonald's essays are, if anything, murmurations for our ominous time – dark yet flashing, stirred from the core."
"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."
"Macdonald reminds us how marvelously unfamiliar much of the nonhuman world remains to us, even as we continue to diminish it ..."
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