Reprinted, White’s 1951 book on falconry details the battle of wills between the author and the hawk he is trying to train.
Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
–This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
“Sports such as ferreting and falconry show the extent to which people are prepared to risk pain and injury in order to enter the world of other species. The arduous experience of training a falcon to accept a person as a perch forms the character both of the bird and its keeper. The experience has been vividly described by TH White in The Goshawk and no reader of that book can doubt that country sports are as unlike human games as wine is unlike water. They do not satisfy some ordinary need for exercise and diversion, any more than wine quenches thirst. They answer to a deeper yearning and intoxicate us with the scent of other worlds. They open a door into the natural life of species: not the pretend life that is imposed on the domestic pet, but the real life that was ordained by nature. Hence the ritual and hence the joy. These sports are genuine rites of passage, which guide us into the world of other animals and help us to know it from within, as a world of instinct, awe and miracles.” –The Observer
The book chronicles the ambivalent relationship between White, author of The Once and Future King, and the hawk he trained. Their battle of wills gives the book its peculiar charm. The New York Times
“It is comic; it is tragic; it is as primal and original as a great windit must be ranked as a masterpiece.” Guy Ramsey, Daily Telegraph (UK)
“A reader who cannot tell a hawk from a handsaw may be swept along by the storm of emotion which blows between the man and his bird, and by the freedom and richness of the romantic treatment of the variations.” Lord Kennet, Sunday Times (UK)
The arduous experience of training a falcon to accept a person as a perch forms the character both of the bird and its keeper. The experience has been vividly described by TH White in The Goshawk The Guardian (UK)
What one man discovered about hawks, and himself, when he set out to learn the medieval art of hawking. Time Magazine, Recent and Readable
A wonderful, classic account of training a bird of prey. The Daily Mail
Its a strange, eccentric book about [T. H. Whites] attempt to train his first goshawk. It displays an absolute love for the English countryside that I immediately recognized. The Mail on Sunday (UK)
In his 1996 introduction, Stephen Bodio writes: This is a book about excruciatingly bad falconry. It is the best book on falconry, its feel, its emotions, and its flavor, ever written. Those oddly juxtaposed statements are exactly on the mark. A classic. The Buffalo News
This is a nature classic, conceived against the background of the second World Wara warm and instructive story. Sunday Times (UK)
What is it that binds human beings to other animals? T. H. White, the author of The Once and Future King and Mistress Mashams Repose, was a young writer who found himself rifling through old handbooks of falconry. A particular sentencethe bird reverted to a feral stateseized his imagination, and, White later wrote, A longing came to my mind that I should be able to do this myself. The word feral has a kind of magical potency which allied itself to two other words, ferocious and free. Immediately, White wrote to Germany to acquire a young goshawk. Gos, as White named the bird, was ferocious and Gos was free, and White had no idea how to break him in beyond the ancient (and, though he did not know it, long superseded) practice of depriving him of sleep, which meant that he, White, also went without rest. 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 Gosat 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 literatures most memorable and surprising encounters with the wildernessas it exists both within us and without.
“Sports such as ferreting and falconry show the extent to which people are prepared to risk pain and injury in order to enter the world of other species. The arduous experience of training a falcon to accept a person as a perch forms the character both of the bird and its keeper. The experience has been vividly described by TH White in The Goshawk and no reader of that book can doubt that country sports are as unlike human games as wine is unlike water. They do not satisfy some ordinary need for exercise and diversion, any more than wine quenches thirst. They answer to a deeper yearning and intoxicate us with the scent of other worlds. They open a door into the natural life of species: not the pretend life that is imposed on the domestic pet, but the real life that was ordained by nature. Hence the ritual and hence the joy. These sports are genuine rites of passage, which guide us into the world of other animals and help us to know it from within, as a world of instinct, awe and miracles.” –The Observer
The book chronicles the ambivalent relationship between White, author of The Once and Future King, and the hawk he trained. Their battle of wills gives the book its peculiar charm. The New York Times
“It is comic; it is tragic; it is as primal and original as a great windit must be ranked as a masterpiece.” Guy Ramsey, Daily Telegraph
“A reader who cannot tell a hawk from a handsaw may be swept along by the storm of emotion which blows between the man and his bird, and by the freedom and richness of the romantic treatment of the variations.” Lord Kennet, Sunday Times
The arduous experience of training a falcon to accept a person as a perch forms the character both of the bird and its keeper. The experience has been vividly described by TH White in The Goshawk The Guardian
What one man discovered about hawks, and himself, when he set out to learn the medieval art of hawking. Time Magazine, Recent and Readable
A wonderful, classic account of training a bird of prey. The Daily Mail
Its a strange, eccentric book about [T. H. Whites] attempt to train his first goshawk. It displays an absolute love for the English countryside that I immediately recognized. The Mail on Sunday
In his 1996 introduction, Stephen Bodio writes: This is a book about excruciatingly bad falconry. It is the best book on falconry, its feel, its emotions, and its flavor, ever written. Those oddly juxtaposed statements are exactly on the mark. A classic. The Buffalo News
This is a nature classic, conceived against the background of the second World Wara warm and instructive story. Sunday Times
The Goshawk (New York Review Books Classics)
Falcon Fever: A Falconer in the Twenty-first Century
*Starred Review* Falconry, a sport most of us equate with medieval kings and Arabian potentates, is alive and well in the twenty-first century.Gallagher, author (The Grail Bird, 2005) and editor in chief of Cornell Laboratory of Ornithologys journal Living Bird, brings this arcane sport to life in his memoir-cum-travelogue-cum-falconry-history. Although he was born in England, Gallaghers family moved to Canada and finally California in his childhood. An abusive father drove the young boy to nature, and when he discovered the thirteenth-century book on falconry by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, he was hooked. In part1 of the book, Gallagher recounts his boyhood, obsessed with hawks and falcons, running with a less-than-perfect crowd, getting arrested for selling marijuana, and spending time in jail. This formative period segues into part 2, when the author decided to spend a year following in Frederick IIs footsteps, both figuratively and literally. This engaging book draws readers in from page 1, and we want to learn more about Gallaghers life, his quest for understanding the souls of falconers from Frederick II to himself, and the majesty of the hunting falcons. A gem. –Nancy Bent –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
What is so compelling about falconry? Tim Gallagher mines his lifelong obsession with falcons for an answer in this engaging volume interweaving memoir, history, and travelogue. An entire subculture exists outside the mainstream of American society consisting of obsessed individuals who still use the ancient training techniques and language of falconry. Gallagher finds that his personal story connects on many levels with that of Frederick II, the thirteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor, legendary falconer, and notorious freethinker who brought the full wrath of the medieval church down upon his dynasty. While following Frederick’s footsteps through southern Italy, Gallagher ponders his personal history as well. What salve to his spirit did falconry provide when it ignited his passion at age twelve? Beset by a turbulent childhood dominated by a brutal and violent father, Gallagher turned to this sport for emotional release. He offers us a unique glimpse into the contemporary falconry subculture, and the result is a surprisingly frank and revealing personal story.
Falcon Fever: A Falconer in the Twenty-first Century 
