H Is for Hawk

New York: Grove Press, 2014. First U.S. ed., first printing (full number line). Hardcover. Fine in fine jacket with faintest signs of wear. in fine dust-jacket. Large octavo in illus black and beige jacket; 300 pages; 22 cm Includes bibliographical references. "An award-winning best-seller from the UK recounts how the author, an experienced falconer grieving the sudden death of her father, endeavored to train for the first time a dangerous goshawk predator as part of her personal recovery. "As a child Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T.H. White's tortured masterpiece, The Goshawk, which describes White's struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest. When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel ... on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals." Contents: Patience -- Lost -- Small worlds -- Mr White -- Holding tight -- The box of stars -- Invisibility -- The Rembrandt interior -- The rite of passage -- Darkness -- Leaving home -- Outlaws -- Alice, falling -- The line -- For whom the bell -- Rain -- Heat -- Flying free -- Extinction -- Hiding -- Fear -- Apple day -- Memorial -- Drugs -- Magical places -- The flight of time -- The new world -- Winter histories -- Enter spring -- The moving earth. Hawks. Grief. Spirituality. Grief. Hawks. Spirituality. Hawks. Falconry. Goshawks. Grief. Spiritual life. Macdonald, Helen, 1970- White, T. H. (Terence Hanbury), 1906-1964. Nature. Ornithology. Spirituality. Autobiography. Autobiographies. Note(s): Originally published: London: Jonathan Cape, 2014./ Includes bibliographical references.