{"product_id":"9781590175460","title":"The Goshawk","description":"The predecessor to Helen Macdonald’s \u003ci\u003eH is for Hawk\u003c\/i\u003e, T. H. White’s nature writing classic, \u003ci\u003eThe Goshawk\u003c\/i\u003e,  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, 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and Gos was  free, and White had no idea how to break him in beyond the ancient (and,  though he did not know it, long superseded) practice of depriving him  of sleep, which meant that he, White, also went without rest.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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhite 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Goshawk\u003c\/i\u003e, one of modern  literature’s most memorable and surprising encounters with the  wilderness—as it exists both within us and without.","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47137944305904,"sku":"9781590175460","price":11.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781590175460_p0.jpg?v=1763809980","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781590175460","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}