Vesper Flights

Vesper Flights PDF Author: Helen Macdonald
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802146694
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The New York Times–bestselling author of H is for Hawk explores the human relationship to the natural world in this “dazzling” essay collection (Wall Street Journal). In Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing the massive migration of songbirds from the top of the Empire State Building, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk’s poplar forests. She writes with heart-tugging clarity about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds’ nests, and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife.

Vesper Flights

Vesper Flights PDF Author: Helen Macdonald
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802146694
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book

Book Description
The New York Times–bestselling author of H is for Hawk explores the human relationship to the natural world in this “dazzling” essay collection (Wall Street Journal). In Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing the massive migration of songbirds from the top of the Empire State Building, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk’s poplar forests. She writes with heart-tugging clarity about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds’ nests, and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife.

H Is for Hawk

H Is for Hawk PDF Author: Helen Macdonald
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802191673
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
New York Times Bestseller: This account of adopting and raising a vicious bird of prey while grieving a father’s death is “a soaring wonder of a book” (The Boston Globe). One of the New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year One of Slate’s 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Last 25 Years Time’s #1 Nonfiction Book of the Year An instant classic and award-winning sensation, Helen Macdonald’s story of adopting and raising one of nature’s most vicious predators has soared into the hearts of millions of readers worldwide. Fierce and feral, her goshawk Mabel’s temperament mirrors Helen’s own state of grief after her father’s death, and together raptor and human “discover the pain and beauty of being alive” (People). H Is for Hawk is a genre-defying debut from a unique and transcendent voice. “Her prose glows and burns.” —The Wall Street Journal “An elegantly written amalgam of nature writing, personal memoir, literary portrait, and an examination of bereavement.” —The Washington Post “Breathtaking . . . 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.” —The New York Times Book Review Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Miami Herald, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Slate, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot

The House on Vesper Sands

The House on Vesper Sands PDF Author: Paraic O'Donnell
Publisher: Tin House Books
ISBN: 195114225X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Named a Library Reads Pick, Apple Books' Best Book, Powells’ Pick, Amazon Fiction & Literature's “Best of the Month," The Millions' Top Ten Book of the Month, and one of CrimeReads' and Oprah Daily's Best Historical Novels of 2021 "Funny, eerie, tender, haunting and unsettling, smokily atmospheric, and fantastically enjoyable." ?Helen Macdonald, author of Vesper Flights London, 1893: high up in a house on a dark, snowy night, a lone seamstress stands by a window. So begins the swirling, serpentine world of Paraic O’Donnell’s Victorian-inspired mystery, the story of a city cloaked in shadow, but burning with questions: why does the seamstress jump from the window? Why is a cryptic message stitched into her skin? And how is she connected to a rash of missing girls, all of whom seem to have disappeared under similar circumstances? On the case is Inspector Cutter, a detective as sharp and committed to his work as he is wryly hilarious. Gideon Bliss, a Cambridge dropout in love with one of the missing girls, stumbles into a role as Cutter’s sidekick. And clever young journalist Octavia Hillingdon sees the case as a chance to tell a story that matters—despite her employer’s preference that she stick to a women’s society column. As Inspector Cutter peels back the mystery layer by layer, he leads them all, at last, to the secrets that lie hidden at the house on Vesper Sands. By turns smart, surprising, and impossible to put down, The House on Vesper Sands offers a glimpse into the strange undertow of late nineteenth-century London and the secrets we all hold inside us.

Believers

Believers PDF Author: Lisa Wells
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374716587
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
"An essential document of our time." —Charles D’Ambrosio, author of Loitering In search of answers and action, the award-winning poet and essayist Lisa Wells brings us Believers, introducing trailblazers and outliers from across the globe who have found radically new ways to live and reconnect to the Earth in the face of climate change We find ourselves at the end of the world. How, then, shall we live? Like most of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by increasingly urgent news of climate change on an apocalyptic scale. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes, but she could not find practical answers. She embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking wisdom and paths to action from outliers and visionaries, pragmatists and iconoclasts. Believers tracks through the lives of these people who are dedicated to repairing the earth and seemingly undaunted by the task ahead. Wells meets an itinerant gardener and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists in rewilding the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing “watershed discipleship” in New Mexico and another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming—guns into ploughshares. She watches the world’s greatest tracker teach others how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land overrun by invasive species and destructive humans. She talks with survivors of catastrophic wildfires in California as they try to rebuild in ways that acknowledge the fires will come again. Through empathic, critical portraits, Wells shows that these trailblazers are not so far beyond the rest of us. They have had the same realization, have accepted that we are living through a global catastrophe, but are trying to answer the next question: How do you make a life at the end of the world? Through this miraculous commingling of acceptance and activism, this focus on seeing clearly and moving forward, Wells is able to take the devastating news facing us all, every day, and inject a possibility of real hope. Believers demands transformation. It will change how you think about your own actions, about how you can still make an impact, and about how we might yet reckon with our inheritance.

Falcon

Falcon PDF Author: Helen Macdonald
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861894902
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
A sacred god, a military tool, an erotic symbol: the falcon is a natural wonder of speed, power, beauty, and ferocity that has become embedded in human cultures in myriad ways. Helen Macdonald's Falcon examines the diverse symbolism and roles attached to the falcon throughout the centuries. Macdonald presents a cultural and natural history of the falcon that spans the globe and several millennia. Her wide-ranging survey considers the many facets of the falcon, including conservation efforts; the sport of falconry; and the use of falcons in secret military projects by the Third Reich and the U.S. space program. Falcon also explores the rich imagery of the falcon over history, including the veneration of falcons as gods in ancient Egypt, their role in erotic stories, and even the use of falcons in advertising to promote photocopiers and jet planes. Filled with illustrations and a wealth of fascinating facts, Falcon will be an enjoyable guide for ornithologists, amateur birdwatchers, and nature lovers alike.

Virgil Wander

Virgil Wander PDF Author: Leif Enger
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 0802146686
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
A man seeks to rediscover his broken Midwestern community in a novel that “brims with grace and quirky charm” by the author of Peace Like a River (Bookpage). Movie house owner Virgil Wander is “cruising along at medium altitude” when his car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior. Though Virgil survives, his language and memory are altered. Awakening in this new life, Virgil begins to piece together the past. He is helped by a cast of curious locals—from a stranger investigating the mystery of his disappeared son, to the vanished man’s enchanting wife, to a local journalist who is Virgil’s oldest friend. Into this community returns a shimmering prodigal son who may hold the key to reviving their town. Leif Enger conjures a remarkable portrait of a region and its residents, who, for reasons of choice or circumstance, never made it out of their defunct industrial district. Carried aloft by quotidian pleasures including movies, fishing, necking in parked cars, playing baseball and falling in love, Virgil Wander is a journey into the heart of America’s Upper Midwest.

Recovery

Recovery PDF Author: Helen Macdonald
Publisher: Arrow
ISBN: 9781784875473
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
The hawk was everything I wanted to be- solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life. How do we carry on when someone close to us dies? Is it simply a case of putting one foot in front of the other in a bleak new world or do we need something more? Reeling with grief after the sudden death of her father, Helen Macdonald found herself turning to the wild for comfort. With breathtaking honesty and insight, she recounts her months spent taming a goshawk and how, finally, this strange kinship led her to the first tentative steps to recovery. Selected from H is for Hawk VINTAGE MINIS- GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us human. Discover the Vintage Minis 'Head Space' series- Therapy by Stephen Grosz Family by Mark Haddon

Reading Group Choices

Reading Group Choices PDF Author: Reading Group Choices
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780975974476
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description


World of Wonders

World of Wonders PDF Author: Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
ISBN: 157131959X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
“A poet celebrates the wonders of nature in a collection of essays that could almost serve as a coming-of-age memoir.” —Kirkus Reviews As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted—no matter how awkward the fit or forbidding the landscape—she was able to turn to our world’s fierce and funny creatures for guidance. “What the peacock can do,” she tells us, “is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.” The axolotl teaches us to smile, even in the face of unkindness; the touch-me-not plant shows us how to shake off unwanted advances; the narwhal demonstrates how to survive in hostile environments. Even in the strange and the unlovely, Nezhukumatathil finds beauty and kinship. For it is this way with wonder: it requires that we are curious enough to look past the distractions in order to fully appreciate the world’s gifts. Warm, lyrical, and gorgeously illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, World of Wonders is a book of sustenance and joy. Praise for World of Wonders Barnes & Noble 2020 Book of the Year An NPR Best Book of 2020 An Esquire Best Book of 2020 A Publishers Weekly “Big Indie Book of Fall 2020” A BuzzFeed Best Book of Fall 2020 “Hands-down one of the most beautiful books of the year.” —NPR “A timely story about love, identity and belonging.” —New York Times Book Review “A truly wonderous essay collection.” —Roxane Gay, The Audacity

The Falcon Thief

The Falcon Thief PDF Author: Joshua Hammer
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 150119190X
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
A “well-written, engaging detective story” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) about a rogue who trades in rare birds and their eggs—and the wildlife detective determined to stop him. On May 3, 2010, an Irish national named Jeffrey Lendrum was apprehended at Britain’s Birmingham International Airport with a suspicious parcel strapped to his stomach. Inside were fourteen rare peregrine falcon eggs snatched from a remote cliffside in Wales. So begins a “vivid tale of obsession and international derring-do” (Publishers Weekly), following the parallel lives of a globe-trotting smuggler who spent two decades capturing endangered raptors worth millions of dollars as race champions—and Detective Andy McWilliam of the United Kingdom’s National Wildlife Crime Unit, who’s hell bent on protecting the world’s birds of prey. “Masterfully constructed” (The New York Times) and “entertaining and illuminating” (The Washington Post), The Falcon Thief will whisk you away from the volcanoes of Patagonia to Zimbabwe’s Matobo National Park, and from the frigid tundra near the Arctic Circle to luxurious aviaries in the deserts of Dubai, all in pursuit of a man who is reckless, arrogant, and gripped by a destructive compulsion to make the most beautiful creatures in nature his own. It’s a story that’s part true-crime narrative, part epic adventure—and wholly unputdownable until the very last page.