Unhappy, lonely, gay but unable to come out, he has left a teaching post to live a solitary life and seek personal redemption through mastering the bird.

The writing, is in parts wonderfully life-affirming, but it is the stark desolation and nihilism that many readers most remember. The other thing that's clear from the beginning is that White himself is very sad in years 1936 and 1937, the period that he's writing about. There was a section near the middle of the book that was almost too sad for me to handle, and I had to quit reading it for a couple of weeks.

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. I tend to favor the smaller books and picked it up, but almost put it back when I discovered it was about falconry, published years ago. The first edition, first impression, of this fascinating memoir involving the training of a goshawk by T.

She dripped blood gently over the gate, while I held up her muzzle in the falconer's glove and looked into her small, opaque, ursine eyes. In my reading life, I can go from being a shad fisherman one week ( The Founding Fish) to being a falconer the next. I passaggi bucolicamente poetici si alternano a riflessioni filosofiche un po' spicciole e volte anche un po' noiosette.I have a wild caught cockatoo that I have had for over 30 years (before it was illegal in NYS to have one) and training him was quite easy in comparison. Un diario di sei settimane di addestramento, in cui lo scrittore-addestratore lotta, sbaglia, fallisce, si tormenta, e alla fine rimane chiuso fuori dal mondo del rapace.

I had mixed feelings reading White's account of his clumsy efforts to train a young hawk for hunting. Its charm stems from the detailed description of their evolving relationship during the arduous, frustrating, and laborious training of this wild bird, spanning 3 months of days, and often sleepless nights.Like White, she was “escaping to the wild” as she trained her bird Mabel, and in many ways she was guided by him – avoiding his mistakes, and sharing his attempt to sublimate the self in nature. During the training the bird was restrained by jesses or leather straps around the ankles, holding him initially by a short leash to a perch or the falconer’s padded arm. I will not give away the outcome of this adventure, other than to say life is not always as we wish it to be. The Goshawk is a fable about selfhood and the exercise of power as much as it is a book about a man and a bird.

I speak here not of a country's or people's verbs, nouns and adjectives, but rather of the peculiar argot of a sport, hobby, or occupation. It was the falconer’s duty to lift the hawk back to the fist with his other hand with gentleness and patience, only to have him bate again, once, twice, twenty, fifty times, all night…”. There's always a chance that Gos is happy and free, that humanity can learn the lessons of wildness but still act and think as itself, and the world isn't ending after all. White, as he himself admits, does a lot of things wrong: feeding the bird far too much, for example. A volergli attribuire un qualche significato aggiuntivo, lo si potrebbe affiancare a Thoreau, oppure anche a tanti altri libri pubblicati in questi ultimi anni in cui si raccontano le esperienze di chi si vuole distaccare, in tutto in parte, dalla civiltà moderna e caotica, per riscoprire un diverso spirito nel contatto con la natura e con i ritmi quotidiani.Conor’s cultured writing and enthusiasm for the natural world and the people, like him, who care about it, will carry you along through the chapters. A little psychodrama between person and bird, fascism and war in the background (he thinks the human world is going to end -- a casual, sombre certainty). Not from courage, but from necessity, I had stood quiet and unprotesting, speaking to him calmly until he let go.