The Goshawk (New York Review Books Classics)

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He had never seen a human being, never been confined in such a box, which smelled of darkness and manufacture and the stink of man. It was this that became The Goshawk, one of modern literature's most memorable and surprising encounters with the wilderness — as it exists both within us and without.

The rest of the story is in the underbelly, in what he is confessing about his point of view, of his little patch of the world.The book briefly describes falconry as an ancient art and sport, primarily of the nobles, dating back to Mesopotamia 3000 years ago and reaching its peak in Medieval Europe. But while reading it, I kept thinking that White, who referred to himself as an austringer (a keeper of goshawks) lived in the 1600s.

Brock: the last of the English bears: I had been proud that her race lived in the same wood with me. He mentions in passing that, on a previous assignment, he was nearly killed by a female Harpy Eagle Harpia harpyja as he inspected a chick in her nest. OFFERED WITH: A signed first edition of Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (London: Cape 2014), Macondald’s highly-praised and moving memoir discussing her own experiences training a hawk, mingled with her reflections on White, The Goshawk, and the book’s influence on her. Even as "I was stroking a murderer, a savage," the bigger world around him is full of mounting violence, and of politics that pursue the kill; he concludes, "we still lived in the Middle Ages. In a 1938 letter, he asks Cockerell “Can you tell me what is the proper sign for an illegitimate union in a family tree?According to White the “hawks are sensitive to the eye and do not like to be regarded–it is their prerogative to regard.