The Goshawk

by T. H. White Narrated by Simon Vance

Overview

The predecessor to Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk, T. H. White's nature-writing classic, The Goshawk, asks the age-old question: What is it that binds human beings to other animals? White, author of The Once and Future King and Mistress Masham's Repose, was a young writer who found himself rifling through old handbooks of falconry. A particular sentence-“the bird reverted to a feral state”-seized his imagination, and, White later wrote, “A longing came to my mind that I should be able to do this myself. The word `feral' has a kind of magical potency which allied itself to two other words, `ferocious' and `free.'” Immediately White wrote to Germany to acquire a young goshawk. Gos, as White named the bird, was ferocious and Gos was free, and White had no idea how to break him in beyond the ancient (and, as it happened, long superseded) practice of depriving him of sleep, which meant that he, White, also went without rest. Slowly man and bird entered a state of delirium and intoxication, of attraction and repulsion that looks very much like love.

White kept a daybook describing his volatile relationship with Gos-at once a tale of obsession, a comedy of errors, and a hymn to the hawk. 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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Reprinted, White's 1951 book on falconry details the battle of wills between the author and the hawk he is trying to train. (Mar.)

From the Publisher

Sports such as ferreting and falconry show the extent to which people are prepared to risk pain and injury in order to enter the world of other species. The arduous experience of training a falcon to accept a person as a perch forms the character both of the bird and its keeper. The experience has been vividly described by TH White in The Goshawk and no reader of that book can doubt that country sports are as unlike human games as wine is unlike water. They do not satisfy some ordinary need for exercise and diversion, any more than wine quenches thirst. They answer to a deeper yearning and intoxicate us with the scent of other worlds. They open a door into the natural life of species: not the pretend life that is imposed on the domestic pet, but the real life that was ordained by nature. Hence the ritual and hence the joy. These sports are genuine rites of passage, which guide us into the world of other animals and help us to know it from within, as a world of instinct, awe and miracles.”
—The Observer

“The book chronicles the ambivalent relationship between White, author of The Once and Future King, and the hawk he trained. Their battle of wills ‘gives the book its peculiar charm.’”
—The New York Times

“It is comic; it is tragic; it is as primal and original as a great wind…it must be ranked as a masterpiece.”
—Guy Ramsey, Daily Telegraph (UK)

“A reader who cannot tell a hawk from a handsaw may be swept along by the storm of emotion which blows between the man and his bird, and by the freedom and richness of the romantic treatment of the variations.”
—Lord Kennet, Sunday Times (UK)

“A wonderful, classic account of training a bird of prey.”
—The Daily Mail

“It’s a strange, eccentric book about [T. H. White’s] attempt to train his first goshawk. It displays an absolute love for the English countryside that I immediately recognized.”
—The Mail on Sunday (UK)

“In his 1996 introduction, Stephen Bodio writes: ‘This is a book about excruciatingly bad falconry. It is the best book on falconry, its feel, its emotions, and its flavor, ever written.’ Those oddly juxtaposed statements are exactly on the mark. A classic.”
—The Buffalo News

AUGUST 2015 - AudioFile

British narrator Simon Vance is the perfect voice for this very British book, an early work by White about his disastrous attempt to train a goshawk. Fans of White’s classic ONCE AND FUTURE KING will recognize how much of this goshawk, and what White learned from falconry, wound up in the magical training of Wart, the future King Arthur, by the wizard Merlin (merlin being a hawk). Readers of Helen Macdonald’s recent, and wonderful, H IS FOR HAWK will already know much about this book and be fascinated by what it was like for White to try to teach himself falconry from medieval sources. Vance’s performance is appropriately donnish, literate, and articulate. He conveys his appreciation for White’s marvelous language with perfect pacing and unflagging attention. B.G. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169720501
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	06/16/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

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