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About Vesper Flights
Product Description Animals don’t exist in order to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. 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. By one of this century’s most important and insightful nature writers, Vesper Flights is a captivating and foundational book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make sense of the world around us. Amazon.com Review It was Helen Macdonald’s unusual way of processing grief that put her on the literary map. In H Is for Hawk we met Mabel, a rancorous raptor Macdonald adopted and trained, and in doing so, wrenched herself free from despair. The book was an award-winning best-seller that captured countless hearts, and not just ones belonging to ornithologists. The why of that is the reason readers will also fall in love with Vesper Flights. More meandering than her memoir, this collection of essays waxes poetic on things ranging from lunar eclipses, to nocturnal bird-watching in Manhattan, to mushroom hunting, and even migraines. Before reading Vesper Flights the only swift I knew about was Taylor, and she’s pretty good at drawing attention to herself. But that is one of Ms. Macdonald’s gifts. She notices things, the magic and the wonder and the consolation of nature, and she mines what those things have to teach us about being better humans and stewards of this planet. Her exquisite prose will get you to pay attention too. Macdonald writes: “Someone once told me that every writer has a subject that underlies everything they write. It can be love or death, betrayal or belonging, home or hope or exile. I choose to think that my subject is love…” That is evident on every page of Vesper Flights. —Erin Kodicek, Amazon Book Review Review 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
