The Goshawk (New York Review Books Classics)

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Also, there was this bizarre psychology between man and bird unlike anything I've ever encountered before. To fly: the horrible aerial toad, the silent-feathered owl, the hump-back aviating Richard III, he made toward me close the ground.

Old things lost their grip and dropped away; not always because they were bad things, but sometimes because the new things were more bad, and stronger. Without it, we get merely an elusive man in an ultimately frustrating struggle with an even more elusive bird. When I heard Helen MacDonald interviewed shortly after H was published and beginning to be noticed, she spoke so fondly of this book that it did make me curious.Tra un uomo e un pennuto, ok, ma sempre sentimento è - per quanto l'autore si affanni a ribadire che nella falconeria il sentimento non conta, per lui è solo psicologia, ma dal suo stesso racconto emerge tutt'altro. Author James Aldred is an EMMY Award-winning cameraman, adventurer and professional tree-climber – ‘The Man Who Climbs Trees’, for those who have read his first published title. Still, White's enthusiasm for the sport and for the intense relationship between falconer and hawk is moving and incisive. He endeavors to train a notoriously difficult-to-train hawk with no falconry experience and with very limited teaching books to aid him. After reading about shad, for example, I wonder at my reaction the next time I meet someone named 'Milt'.

Avendo per marito un cacciatore impenitente che in parte si duole per il mio completo disinteresse verso l'attività venatoria, quando mi sono illuminata alla vista dei rapaci, poco c'è mancato che me ne procurasse uno - non certo per farmi un regalo ma piuttosto sperando in un futuro supporto e diversivo nella caccia alla lepre.Pigeons, on the other hand, are peace-loving birds, good parents and citizens, and "the most susceptible to the principles of the League of Nations". And this is the twisted contradiction White offers us in his self: he is an En-glish-man, he rules his little land. Of course, the two parts are not clearly split, but are interwoven together like the warp and weft which make a fabric.

It chronicles White's efforts to apply the falconry methods of the Middle Ages and train a bird named Gos. 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. C'è tutto il sentimento del rapporto uomo-animale domestico: ognuno leggendo ritroverà qualcosa del rapporto con il proprio cane o gatto.According to White the “hawks are sensitive to the eye and do not like to be regarded–it is their prerogative to regard. You crushed that correspondent by some excellent replies in which you cruelly referred to him as ‘he or she’ and he or she made exit crawling backwards mumbling. In larger doses this would perhaps grow wearisome – but we are soon back to crisp delineations of feather and flight, and patient logbook chronicles of comings and goings at the nest. The book is cut up as a diary, and I feel it should be read like this too, day by day, and not too many days on one day… It has a wonderful 30ies atmosphere about it though it mainly plays in the countryside. I can't help thinking it's a kind of animal cruelty, especially in the way White tried it (not to mention that I don't understand the appeal of hunting for sport).