I'm kind of a bird person. I've owned parakeets and canaries and cockatiels and even a Macaw parrot. I named all the finches who play in my backyard birdbath "Krishna," because why not? Somewhere along the line, I realized two things: one, birds are WAY smarter than we have any idea of, and two, I will never put another bird in a cage. However, Helen Macdonald's description of training her goshawk made me want to leash my own raptor to a curtain rod in the living room and watch it bate while I offered it bloody rabbit bits. 
 That kind of thinking is so far out of my wheelhouse it indicates just how intense and provocative this memoir is. There's a lot of death in this book, and it is very British, except that the author is surprisingly forthcoming with admissions and confessions of deeply felt griefs and fears and anxieties and anger and sorrow. She also parallels many of her remembrances with T. H. White's tortured memoir The Goshawk and other unhappy biographical details of White's experience of falconry (and life). 
 In the end, I was left feeling exhausted by Macdonald's traumas, but also amazingly informed on the practice of falconry, on training a goshawk, and on the intimate details of predator birds and their habits as well as the socio-economic history of England's fascination with falconry. I also enjoyed Macdonald's consistent comparison of her relationship with her bird and her emotional and mental healing as she tried to recover from the grief of her father's untimely death.