Helen MacDonald was born in Chertsey, Surrey, England in 1970. She received a BA in English Literature from New Hall, University of Cambridge, in 1993. From 1995-1999, she worked in falcon conservation, including at breeding projects in Wales and apparently also in Saudi Arabia. In 1999, she received a MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and between 2000 and when the book begins in 2007, she worked variously as a freelance writer, poet, College Research Fellow and a teacher.
Helen and her father
H is for Hawk is more than a book about falconry, however. MacDonald's sudden passion for getting and training a goshawk was triggered by the death of her beloved father, press photographer Alasdair MacDonald in 2007. H is for Hawk is as much about loss, grieving, and humanity as it is about training a hawk. It also contains a mini-biography of T.H. White.
In 2014, Helen MacDonald was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction for H is for Hawk.
More about Hawks and Falconry
To help you with your raptor identification, here's a silhouette chart. Unfortunately, it doesn't contain a goshawk silhouette.
For additional raptor identification help, here's a short slide show.
For help with training your falcon, here's a list of books on the topic available at the San Leandro Library.
Falconry today by Samson, Jack, Publication Date 1976, Call Number 799.23 SAM
Falconry and hawking byGlasier, Phillip, Publication Date 1998,Call Number 799.232 GLASIER
Falcons and falconry by Illingworth, Frank, Publication Date 1969, Call Number 799.23 ILL
Falconry : the essential guide by Wright, Steve, Publication Date 2006, Call Number 799.232 WRIGHT
A rage for falcons by Bodio, Stephen, Publication Date 1984, Call Number 799.23 BODIO
The goshawk by White, T. H. (Terence Hanbury), Publication Date 1951, Call Number 799.23 WHI
Falcon fever : a falconer in the twenty-first century by Gallagher, Tim, Publication Date 2008, Call Number 799.232 GALLAGHER
According to Sue Monk Kidd's official biography, she was born and raised in Sylvester Georgia [in 1948], graduated from Texas Christian University in 1970 and later took creative writing courses at Emory University and Anderson College, as well as studying at Sewanee, Bread Loaf, and other writers conferences. Kidd's earlier published work was mainly essays about her journey from evangelical Christianity to feminist theology. When she was in her 40s, she began writing fiction, winning the South Carolina Fellowship in Literature and the 1996 Poets & Writers Exchange Program in Fiction. Her short stories appeared in TriQuarterly, Nimrod, and other literary journals and received a Katherine Anne Porter award and citations in Best American Short Stories’ 100 Distinguished Stories. Her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, spent more than 2½ years on the New York Times bestseller list, sold more than 6 million copies in the U.S. and 8 million copies worldwide, received many awards, and was made into a movie in 2008.
Kidd’s second novel, The Mermaid Chair, has sold well over a million copies since its publication by Viking in 2005, reaching #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and remaining on the hardcover and paperback lists for nine months, also nominated for and receiving awards, and made into a television movie by Lifetime. The Invention of Wings, Kidd’s third novel was published January 7, 2014 by Viking to wide critical acclaim. It debuted on the New York Times bestseller list at #1 and remained on the hardcover fiction list for over six months. It has sold over a million copies and been translated into 20 languages thus far. The winner of several literary awards, including the SIBA Book Award, the novel was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0.
Kidd serves on the Writers Council for Poets & Writers, Inc. She lives in Southwest Florida with her husband, Sandy.
Sue Monk Kidd discusses The Invention of Wings at the Florida Book Awards:
The History Behind the Historical Fiction
The Grimke Sisters
Sarah Moore Grimke
Angelina Emily Grimke
The story of the abolitionist, feminist Grimke sisters, as told in The Invention of Wings is actually fairly close to the historical record, although Kidd admits to having tweaked the timeline somewhat. The character of Hetty (Handful) was based upon a real-life Hetty who was given to Sarah, as in the story, but the real-life Hetty actually died shortly after being given to Sarah, so the character in the book is entirely fictional.
One interesting connected story that was not referred to in the book is that one of their brothers had three mix-raced sons, and after that brother's death, the sisters brought their brother's sons up north to receive an education.
Denmark Vesey
The freed slave, Denmark Vesey, was a real historic character, born in the Virgin Islands around 1767, he was brought to Charleston by his master, a sea captain, won $1500 in a lottery, and used his winnings to purchase his freedom and that of his first wife and their children. The rebellion planned by Vesey and described in the book, was the most ambitious of the planned slave rebellions in its scope. It was inspired by the revolution in Haiti in 1791 and scheduled to take place on Bastille Day (July 14) 1822, though the plan was betrayed before it could be put into action.
The congregation of African American freedmen and slaves that Handful attended in The Invention of Wings was most likely based on Emanuel AME Church, a congregation that Denmark Vesey helped to found. The church building housing the congregation was burned down in 1822 after Vesey's rebellion. The congregation rebuilt the church for a while, but was outlawed in 1834 and forced to meet in secret. After the Civil War, the church building was rebuilt (picture at left) with help in part from Robert Vesey, one of Denmark Vesey's sons. That building was destroyed by an earthquake in 1886 and rebuilt on its present site in 1891. The congregation sadly was thrust into the limelight again on June 17, 2105, when a racist young white man, Dylan Roof, entered the church on a pretext of joining evening prayer services and then proceeded to shoot and kill nine members of the congregation.
Stories Told in Pictures
Sue Monk Kidd states that in creating the character Charlotte and her story quilt, she was inspired by the Bible quilts of Harriet Powers, an African American folk artist from rural Georgia, born a slave in 1837. Harriet Powers technique was influenced by the appliqué style of the Fon people of what is now the country of Benin, and Kidd created Charlotte as a descendant of the Fon. Here is an example of Fon appliqué from Benin.
This appliqué also reminds me of the Royal Palace in Abomey, Benin. The walls of the palace are decorated with bas-relief sculptures of sun-baked clay that tell the stories of the Fon kings who lived in the palace at the height of their people's power.
Hannah Kent is a Melbourne-based writer, born in Adelaide in 1985. Her first novel, Burial Rites, has been translated into over twenty languages and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) and the Guardian First Book Award. It won the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year, the Indie Awards Debut Fiction Book of the Year and the Victorian Premier's People's Choice Award, and has most recently been longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Hannah is also the co-founder and publishing director of Australian literary journal Kill Your Darlings. She is currently writing her second novel.
In the following video, Hannah Kent tells how Burial Rites grew out of her experiences as an exchange student in Iceland.
Background Information on Icelandic History and Language
Follow this link to a timeline of Icelandic history, which lends some insight into the tangle of overlapping jurisdictions and the necessity to quarter Agnes Magnúsdóttir at Jón Jónsson's farm while an official determination was made as to who was going to execute her and how.
There was a brief discussion of the Icelandic alphabet and pronunciation at the beginning of the book, at least in the hardcover version. Here is a link to a page on the Icelandic language that provides a more detailed
A Story of Cold, Dark, Long Winters and Isolation
Shoreline at Illugastaðir
This would be the area of the north Icelandic coast near where Natan Ketilsson's farm was located.
Two boys named "Wes Moore" were born in Baltimore within a year of each other. One would go on to work for the State Department; the other would wind up in prison for life, convicted of murder.
The author Wes Moore's story is covered in detail in The Other Wes Moore up until he is a graduate of Valley Forge Military Academy and on the point of becoming a college student and a military officer. His website notes that he went on to graduate as a Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in International Relations from Johns Hopkins university in 2001 and then went on to become a Rhodes Scholar studying International Relations at Oxford University.
After college, Wes Moore completed his military service, serving as a paratrooper and a captain in the army. He did a combat tour in Afghanistan. He talks about his military experience in the TED Talk video below.
After completing his military service, Wes Moore "then served as a White House fellow to Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice. He serves on the board of the Iraq Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), The Johns Hopkins University, and founded an organization called STAND! that works with Baltimore youth involved in the criminal justice system."
According to Wes Moore's website, a portion of the proceeds from The Other Wes Moore go to City Year, an education-oriented volunteer project for young adults from ages 17-24, and the US Dream Academy, an after-school and mentoring program for at-risk youngsters, especially the children of incarcerated parents.
...“He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.” He also gave his characters a distinctive language and convincing motivations in a genre that had grown stereotyped, flaccid and uninvolving.
The Maltese Falcon is the Hammett novel that jumps from the pages of its genre and into literature. It’s the book that introduces Sam Spade, the private detective who seduced a generation of readers, leading directly to Philip Marlowe. Dorothy Parker, never a pushover, confessed herself “in a daze of love” such as she had not known in literature “since I encountered Sir Lancelot” and claimed to have read the novel some 30 or 40 times.
Perhaps The Maltese Falcon is most widely known through the 1941 classic movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor, but there were two prior movie incarnations of the novel.
The first movie version of The Maltese Falcon was filmed in 1931 and is somewhat racier due to having been made prior to the Hayes Code, which regulated "morality" in movies. Some critics have rated this movie as equal, if not superior, to the familiar 1941 version.
The second movie version of The Maltese Falcon was made in 1936, starring Bette Davis, and renamed "Satan Met a Lady," and according to critics, sometimes seems as much a comedy as a crime story.
I was able to locate a short documentary about the life of Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon, on YouTube.
On line, I also found a memoir of Dashiell Hammett by his long-time friend and companion, author and playwright Lillian Hellman, from the November 25, 1965 issue of The New York Review of Books.
Daniel Woodrell was born March 4, 1953, in Springfield, Missouri. He grew up in Missouri and dropped out of high school to join the Marines. Later he earned a BA from the University of Kansas and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
He lives in West Plains, Missouri, in the Ozarks (AKA "West Table, Missouri, in his novels), and is married to the novelist Katie Estill
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Woodrell has set most of his eight novels in the Missouri Ozarks, a landscape which he knew from childhood. He has created novels based on crime, a style he termed "country noir", a phrase which has been adopted by commentators on his work.
In addition to finding readers for his fiction, Woodrell has had two novels adapted for films. Woodrell's second novel, Woe to Live On (1987), was adapted for the 1999 film Ride with the Devil, directed by Ang Lee.
The more recent Winter's Bone (2006) was adapted by writer and director Debra Granik for a film of the same title, released commercially in June 2010 after winning two awards at the Sundance Film Festival, including the Grand Jury Prize for a dramatic film.Several critics called it one of the best films of the year and an American classic, and it received four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.
In the interview video below, Daniel Woodrell talks briefly about The Maid's Version and about drawing inspiration for his writing from the people and environs of the Missouri Ozarks.
In the above interview, Woodrell mentions that the West Table dance hall explosion of 1929 was based on a real dance hall explosion, which took place in West Plains in 1928 and continues to be remembered and memorialized to this day. There are also numerous websites dedicated to keeping the memory of the dead alive. One of the most informative is an archival page from Howell County with newspaper articles of the day chronicling the event. A nonfiction history has also been written by Lin Waterhouse, and she has set up a Facebook page about her book and about remembering the dead.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, posting about this month's book, The Maid's Version, by Daniel Woodrell, will be late this month, but I should have some material up by Friday afternoon (February 5) and hope to see you all on Saturday.
