Traces the lives of ordinary people in Nazi-occupied Prague. In this ironic pageant of crossing and recrossing lives, death wins all the battles but ultimately loses the war, defeated by the fragile flowering of courage and defiance.
Marie Winn Books
January 1, 1936
Marie Winn's writing delves into the intricate relationship between humanity and the natural world, particularly through the lens of nature and birdwatching. Her prose is characterized by keen observation and a profound appreciation for the complexities of the environment. Winn explores the deep connections that bind us to the earth, often highlighting the often-overlooked beauty and wonder that surrounds us. Her perspective encourages readers to engage more thoughtfully with their surroundings.
This account of one man’s tempestuous relationship with the hawk he trained is at once a comedy of errors, a classic of nature writing, and one of the best glimpses into the world of falconry. 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, the 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 he immediately wrote to Germany to acquire a young goshawk. Gos, as White named the bird, was ferocious and free, and White had no idea how to break him in beyond the ancient of depriving him of sleep. 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.
