H is for Hawk
Helen Macdonald · 2014
After her father's sudden death, Macdonald trained a goshawk named Mabel and wrote a book that is simultaneously a grief memoir, a falconry manual, and a literary biography of T.H. White. The combination shouldn't work. It works completely. Won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year because nobody could figure out which category it belonged in.
The case against
Macdonald's prose works at maximum intensity on every page, and a hawk can carry only so much metaphor before it buckles. The T.H. White chapters, a whole biography running inside the memoir, will be either the best thing here or the part you skim, and the book gives you no say about taking both.
Memoir · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
