falconer like herself. As she rears Mabel, her goshawk chick, she reflects on the history of the sport and reconsiders a favorite book from her childhood: The Goshawk by T.H. White. Replete with sensory details of falconry and soaring descriptions of the countryside near her home in Cambridge, England, H is for Hawk is both a moving account of grief and a fascinating glimpse into an unseen world. For another lyrical memoir by a falconer, try Richard Hines' No Way But Gentlenesse.

What makes a bird a bird? To find out, nature writer Sy Montgomery observes and interacts with specimens ranging from bean-sized baby hummingbirds to six-foot-tall, 150-pound cassowaries. Describing seven encounters with birds, including Montgomery's own backyard flock and the dancing cockatoo whose moves made him an internetPages

Thursday, 13 June 2013

General Keith Alexander, the chief of the US National Security Agency, today appeared before a Senate committee and was quizzed publicly for the first time on issues related to the agency's recently revealed surveillance programs.

Most of the questions Alexander faced concerned the secret mass retention of Americans' phone records, exposed by the Guardian last week, which the spy chief said is necessary to conduct retrospective surveillance of patterns of communication during counter-terrorism investigations — enabling the agency to go "back and time" to monitor who has called whom, when, and for how long.

Perhaps the most notable point in Alexander's appearance came during an exchange with Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley (Democrat), who asked a few specific, probing questions about the section of the Patriot Act (215)