The New York Times - Parul Sehgal
…[Macdonald's] work is an antidote to so much romantic, reductive writing about the natural world as pristine, secret, uninhabited—as a convenient blank canvas for the hero's journey of self-discovery. Macdonald's writing teems with other voices and perspectives, with her own challenges to herself. It muddies any facile ideas about nature and the human, and prods at how we pleat our prejudices, politics and desires into our notions of the animal world…The essays in Vesper Flights…are short, varied and highly edible…Macdonald experiments with tempo and style, as if testing out different altitudes and finding she can fly at just about any speed, in any direction, with any aim she likes, so supple is her style…I was reminded of the goshawk, so thickly plumed, so powerful that it can bring down a deer, and yet it weighs only a few pounds. These are the very paradoxes of Macdonald's prose—its lightness and force.
Publishers Weekly
04/06/2020
English naturalist Macdonald (H Is for Hawk) offers meditations on the natural world and its inhabitants in an inviting collection of 41 new and previously published essays that are infused with wonder, nostalgia, and melancholy. Macdonald ruminates on the pleasures of watching animals in “Wicken,” and recalls encounters with fierce creatures in “Nothing Like a Pig,” about wild boars, and in “Hares,” about boxing hares—“magical harbingers of spring” that are increasingly rare in Britain. She reflects on her childhood in “Nests,” in which she recalls collecting detritus like seeds and pinecones, and in “Tekels Park,” about roaming a meadow in the 1970s that’s since been sold to developers. Her appreciation of birds is displayed in essays including “A Cuckoo in the House,” which details how cuckoos trick other birds into sheltering them, and the title essay, about the flight patterns of “magical” swifts. The message throughout is clear: the world humans enjoy today may not be around tomorrow, so it should not be taken for granted. This will inspire readers to get outside. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Praise for Vesper Flights
Instant New York Times Bestseller
One of Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2020
Named One of the Best Books of the Summer by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, TIME, and Literary Hub
"Macdonald experiments with tempo and style, as if testing out different altitudes and finding she can fly at just about any speed, in any direction, with any aim she likes, so supple is her style. She writes about migration patterns and storms, nests as a metaphor for the domestic and the danger of using nature as metaphor at all. I was reminded of the goshawk, so thickly plumed, so powerful that it can bring down a deer, and yet it weighs only a few pounds. These are the very paradoxes of Macdonald’s prose — its lightness and force." —Parul Sehgal, New York Times
"Vesper Flights is a book of tremendous purpose. Throughout these essays, Macdonald revisits the idea that as a writer it is her responsibility to take stock of what’s happening to the natural world and to convey the value of the living things within it.” —Washington Post
"If you’re looking to see the natural world through someone else’s eyes, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better set than those of Helen Macdonald...[Her] writing is miraculously light and substantive at the same time, and her prose is so beautiful, my review copy was hopelessly dog-eared. What makes her such a great observer is her humility and willingness to crack herself open with awe." —San Francisco Chronicle
"MacDonald’s writing captures the inexpressible rhythm of being... [Her] essays are, if anything, murmurations for our ominous time – dark yet flashing, stirred from the core." —USA Today
“[E]xhilarating… No one describes the everyday natural world with greater power or beauty.” —Slate
“Dazzling… Ms. Macdonald reminds us how marvelously unfamiliar much of the nonhuman world remains to us, even as we continue to diminish it.” —Wall Street Journal
“For many this year, the great outdoors has been the great beyond, rendering it impossible to feel at one with nature. For this reason, Vesper Flights is essential reading right now. But it is also a book to relish at any time, both for its intelligence and grace, and its ability to edify and enchant in equal measure.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“[An] altogether memorable collection . . . Exemplary writing about the intersection of the animal and human worlds.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“An inviting collection… infused with wonder, nostalgia, and melancholy." —Publishers Weekly
“Gorgeously composed, complexly affecting, and stunningly revelatory.” —Booklist (starred review)
“An essential writer on nature, humanity, and loss. Macdonald fills her narratives with vivid descriptions of the wildlife that surrounds us.” —TIME
“A profound meditation on life and freedom.” —Entertainment Weekly
Praise for H is for Hawk:
“Breathtaking . . . Helen Macdonald renders an indelible impression of a raptor’s fierce essence—and her own—with words that mimic feathers, so impossibly pretty we don’t notice their astonishing engineering.” —New York Times Book Review (cover review)
“Beautiful and nearly feral...H Is for Hawk reminds us that excellent nature writing can lay bare some of the intimacies of the wild world as well.” —New York Times
“Macdonald is a poet, her language rich and taut.” —Chicago Tribune
“Captivating and beautifully written, it’s a meditation on the bond between beasts and humans and the pain and beauty of being alive.” —People (Book of the Week)
“One of the loveliest things you’ll read this year . . . You’ll never see a bird overhead the same way again. A-” —Entertainment Weekly
“Dazzling.” —Vogue
“Coherent, complete, and riveting, perhaps the finest nonfiction I read in the past year.” —New Yorker
“An elegantly written amalgam of nature writing, personal memoir, literary portrait and an examination of bereavement. . . . It illuminates unexpected things in unexpected ways.” —Washington Post
“Glows and burns.” —Wall Street Journal
“Assured, honest and raw . . . a soaring wonder of a book.” —Boston Globe
Library Journal
07/01/2020
British writer historian Macdonald follows her best seller H Is for Hawk with a collection of nature essays, some new and some previously published. Though this collection looks at many kinds of natural phenomena—from swifts, Eurasion cranes, and hawfinches to deer, boar, fens, and the possibility of life on Mars—each essay reveals how animals and nature have broadened and altered the author's way of looking at the world. Some of her most compelling stories explore "the strange collisions and collusions" between natural history and British national history: swan upping, the swan census conducted annually on the Thames River, is a centuries-old ceremony deeply connected to monarchy and pageantry. In addition, the phenomenon of British spies being bird enthusiasts is examined in the intriguing profile of Maxwell Knight, a long-time MI5 spy handler. Written in Macdonald's trademark piercing prose, these essays probe the author's fascination with the complexity, mystery, and magic of nature, including how we observe the world around us and make sense of our place within it. VERDICT Macdonald's unique voice is highly recommended for fans of her first book and science enthusiasts who enjoy natural history with a British flavor. [See Prepub Alert, 2/12/20.]—Cynthia Lee Knight, formerly with Hunterdon Cty. Lib., Flemington, NJ
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-04-20
Falconer and writer Macdonald follows on elegant memoir H Is for Hawk (2015) with a set of essays on nature.
“I choose to think that my subject is love,” writes the author at the beginning, “and most specifically love for the glittering world of non-human life around us.” Love sometimes turns to lamentation as she notes how much of the natural world has been destroyed in her lifetime. There are some particularly wonderful moments in this altogether memorable collection, as when Macdonald recounts retreating from a shy girlhood, teased and even bullied by her schoolmates, with the aid of binoculars and field guides that allowed her to escape into a different, better world: “This method of finding refuge from difficulty was an abiding feature of my childhood.” Later in that passage, she continues, “when I was a child I’d assumed animals were just like me. Later I thought I could escape myself by pretending I was an animal. Both were founded on the same mistake. For the deepest lesson animals have taught me is how easily and unconsciously we see other lives as mirrors of our own.” The author also recounts her treks looking for wild boars, the descendants of once-domesticated pigs that are now not quite like pigs at all, having reclaimed ancestral fierceness. Macdonald allows that while her encounters with such creatures are eminently real, she’s fully open to the possibilities of symbolic encounter as well. Anthropomorphism may be a sin among biologists, but as long as it doesn’t go to silly lengths, she’s not above decorating a nest box—and those decorations, she writes in a perceptive piece, are as class-inflected as anything else in class-conscious Britain. Perhaps the finest piece is also the most sobering, a reflection on the disappearance of spring, “increasingly a short flash of sudden warmth before summer, hardly a season at all.”
Exemplary writing about the intersection of the animal and human worlds.
