His friends have urged him to take up arms to fight the fascists, but he "would rather shoot rabbits than people". Se la caccia con i rapaci è l'argomento principe di questo quasi memoir, non manca la contraddizione fra la paura della guerra, il pacifismo e la violenza comunque insita nella caccia e nel voler addestrare per sé un rapace a fare quello che dovrebbe fare per natura. After reading about shad, for example, I wonder at my reaction the next time I meet someone named 'Milt'. Macdonald's brilliance is to look into White's entire life, his homosexuality, his traumatic upbringing, and the sadistic tendencies he kept rigorously in check, to produce a psychosexual analysis that would have delighted Freud. White boys have done their best to hog it all ever since they bought enough of the world to convince themselves that what they had was all that was worth having, and while I don't begrudge (leastwise not as much) those such as White who actually make use of it, it does make the reading effort predictably insufficient at times, with the human one one side and the means violently kept from them on the other.

After half a dozen more bates - the flurry was almost continuous - I inclined my hand against his efforts to climb up the jess. Love asketh but himself to please, To bind another to his delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, and And builds a hell in heaven's despite. Even if you have to read it twice, like something in a history lesson, this pedigree is a vital part of the tragedy of King Arthur.Sarà che di storie di cacciagione ne ho già sentite talmente tante da averne sopra la cima dei capelli… finisco per togliergli una mezza stellina. quando bruciavo dalla voglia di schiacciarlo, e, mentre il sangue mi saliva furiosamente alla testa, di pestarlo, fracassarlo, smembrarlo, torcerlo, slogarlo, spennarlo, disperderlo ai quattro venti, picchiarlo, sbatterlo, trascinarlo e schiacciarlo sotto i piedi, punirlo senza pietà, e cancellarlo, farla finita con quell'odioso, imbecille, demente, indomabile, inqualificabile, insopportabile Gos.

The classic story about training the goshawk, the book from which Helen MacDonald’s “H is for Hawk” takes some of its material. Non c’è nessun desiderio di transfert affettivi, nessuna richiesta di disonorevoli atti d’omaggio o di riconoscenza. So, I'll certainly take this worthwhile reading experience for what it was, but I continue to seek out that material which takes all that this has to offer and then some: seeking, discovering, and sustaining a note that makes the whole idea of the human species worth it, but as consequence of being integrated into the wider whole, not due to being so artificially lifted up as to have nothing better to do at the top. Those passages pulsed brightly, like little electrical charges, in MacDonald's book, which I thought was otherwise quite flat. On a day when the gentry conducts a foxhunt outside his home, he watches a young sow badger emerge at the wrong time from the forest and encounter two well-made-up women who sit and stare at it.According to White the “hawks are sensitive to the eye and do not like to be regarded–it is their prerogative to regard. Al millesimo salto della giornata, col braccio piegato a L, irrigidito e dolorante fino all'osso sotto il peso dell'uccello, limitarsi a dargli dei colpetti col guanto per farlo tornare al pugno, parlargli cortesemente ricorrendo al miagolio che nei miei tentativi di conversazione era la cosa che sembrava gradire di più, sorridere allo spazio ignorando la sua presenza, rassicurarlo col calma. White's project moved me in the way that Wild did, the obstinacy of having no right to try this thing that they find they simply must, must do.

far from the bitter, sexual confusion of the metropolis or the small wars of the schoolroom" (Macdonald).White is best known for his magnificent re-telling of the Arthurian saga in his Once and Future King tetralogy — The Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight, and The Candle in the Wind. Also, there was this bizarre psychology between man and bird unlike anything I've ever encountered before. E in questo libro i sentimenti emergono bene, bisogna riconoscerlo: a volte contrastanti, magari non per tutti comprensibili e/o condivisibili, ma sentimenti veri e sinceri. I hoped he would snap his jesses safely, the ungovernable barbarian, and live a very long happy life in the wild world: unless I could catch him again, as a partner whom I should never dare to treat as captive. Oh, lo strazio della pazienza, il continuo rimuginare, gli sforzi compiuti nel senso di una sovrumana benevolenza!