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
"It sometimes bogs down beneath the weight of its adjectives...Still, her evocative sense of place and her meticulous observations burst through the purple prose."
"Some of her most compelling stories explore 'the strange collisions and collusions' between natural history and British national history ..."
"She crafts brilliant descriptions, drawing wisdom from her observations ..."
"Acknowledging that nature exists everywhere, not only in places where humans don't live, means that there are things, big and small, we can and must do: design houses so that they offer space where swifts may nest; switch off the lights in our big cities at night to keep migrating birds from getting confused; demand that a beautiful meadow, home to multiple forms of life, be made part of that new housing development instead of being flattened by asphalt."
"This will inspire readers to get outside."
"There is abundant wonder and beauty here, but they are shadowed by concern and grief because the north to which Macdonald's compass points is climate change and its ravaging of life's intricate web, from the monumental to the microbial ..."
"Macdonald's is a voice of introspection that seems fully suited to the global grief ..."
"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."
"Exemplary writing about the intersection of the animal and human worlds."
"Macdonald experiments with tempo and style, as if testing out different altitudes and finding she can fly at just about any speed, in any direction, with any aim she likes, so supple is her style...I was reminded of the goshawk, so thickly plumed, so powerful that it can bring down a deer, and yet it weighs only a few pounds."
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