Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Vesper Flights
    Vesper Flights
    Vesper Flights
    Audiobook10 hours

    Vesper Flights

    Written by Helen Macdonald

    Narrated by Helen Macdonald

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    Animals don’t exist in order to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they
    teach us is what we think we know about ourselves.

    From the bestselling author of H is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights, a transcendent collection of essays about the
    human relationship to the natural world.

    Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best-loved writing along with new pieces covering a thrilling
    range of subjects. There are essays here on headaches, on catching swans, on hunting mushrooms, on twentiethcentury spies, on numinous experiences and high-rise buildings; on nests and wild pigs and the tribulations of
    farming ostriches.

    Vesper Flights is a book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make the world
    around us. Moving and frank, personal and political, it confirms Helen Macdonald as one of this century’s greatest
    nature writers.

    Editor's Note

    Soaring collection…

    A soaring collection of essays from the author of “H is for Hawk.” Helen Macdonald immerses readers in the natural world with a reverence that’s life-affirming. A lovely reminder to make time to watch the wild world around us.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateAug 25, 2020
    ISBN9781980036449
    Author

    Helen Macdonald

    Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator and naturalist, and an affiliated research scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of the bestselling H is for Hawk, as well as a cultural history of falcons, titled Falcon, and three collections of poetry, including Shaler’s Fish. Macdonald was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, has worked as a professional falconer, and has assisted with the management of raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia. She now writes for the New York Times Magazine.

    More audiobooks from Helen Macdonald

    Related to Vesper Flights

    Related audiobooks

    Nature For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for Vesper Flights

    4/5

    136 ratings14 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Alone among the literate world, I was made uncomfortable by the relationship between naturalist Macdonald and Mabel the formerly wild hawk told in H is for Hawk. These essays on many topics are written in Author Macdonald's justly celebrated elegant prose, and include so many aperçus that my commonplace book blew up. If you don't share my unease with people venerating wildness while taming it out of a fellow being, you'll enjoy this collection without my unshakeable unease.
    • 5/5
      Listen only if you want to experience how lovely the world is
    • 5/5
      Slightly uneven as any collection of essays probably would be, but there are real delights in here. Some of my favorites were "Eclipse," "Vesper Flights," and "Goats," which made me laugh out loud. Lovely writing and often thought-provoking as well.
    • 4/5
      I normally shy away from essay collections, I really can't explain why, I just do, but I so thoroughly enjoyed H is for Hawk that I had to pick up this book (actually, my wife and I gave it to each other for Christmas (returned one copy and ended up walking out with three more books)). Some of the essays are more engaging than others, but all are coming from Ms. Macdonald's heart. She writes how I feel.
    • 5/5
      Particularly liked: "Nothing like a Pig" and "Eclipse."
    • 5/5
      In the introduction, Macdonald describes this book of essays as a Victorian Wunderkammer – a cabinet full of curiosities and wonders.Although I enjoyed Macdonald’s first book, [H is for Hawk], I loved these short sparkling essays. They encompass a variety of subjects – nature, birds, mammals, climate change and growing up out of step with her peers.Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      I want everyone to read Vesper Flights. Helen Macdonald writes the kind of book I love, a book that speaks of nature and humanity and how they intersect. And how they don’t. And maybe how they should and shouldn’t.

      I especially would love this book to be a part of school curriculum. But why stop there? I’d love for scientists, politicians, new age practitioners, tarot card readers, ornithologists, naturalists, shamans, falconers and wildlife rehabilitators to read Vesper Flights. To name a few groups of people! ;)

      Macdonald weaves great stories around her personal experiences with birds, her thoughts and how those two worlds intersect. She does it beautifully, and I found myself rereading the last few paragraphs of each vignette, sometimes out loud, so I could let the words really sink in.

      Vesper Flights also contains a sobering section about our planet and its future, that will likely serve as a jumping off point for some readers to research what they can do to help.

      I often find that my mind and compassion expand when I read and this is definitely true of Vesper Flights. It’s a thoughtful, honest, beautiful and engaging collection.

      Note: I received this book via Netgalley. These are my unbiased thoughts.
    • 5/5
      A lovely collection of essays about nature. Ho hum, you say? No, no! These are truly lovely. Helen MacDonald uses lyrical prose to take the reader on quiet, profound, thought-provoking sojourns which cause the reader to realize that quiet understanding of nature's subtleties can provide visions of our human frailties, meaning where there had been none, and beauty absolutely everywhere. On these sojourns we meet hawks, swans, cuckoos and more creatures, each of whom enlightens the reader, once the reader quietens themselves enough to observe and absorb. MacDonald is a treasure! You might want to also read, " H Is For Hawk".
    • 4/5
      “It was science that taught me how the flights of tens of millions of migrating birds across Europe and Africa, lines on the map drawn in lines of feather, starlight and bone, are stranger and more astonishing than I ever could have imagined, for these creatures navigate by visualizing the Earth's magnetic field...”“For days afterwards, my dreams are full of songbirds, the familiar ones from woods and backyards, but also points of moving light, little astronauts, travelers using the stars to navigate, having fallen to earth for a little while before picking themselves up and moving on.”“There is a special phenomenology to walking in the woods in winter. On windless days there's a deep, soft hush that makes the sound of a stick breaking underfoot resemble a pistol shot. Its a quietness that fosters an acute sensitivity to small sounds that earlier in the year would be buried under a riot of birdsong.” “Later (swifts) gather higher in the sky...And then, all at once, as if summoned by a call or a bell, they rise higher and higher until they disappear from view. These ascents are called vesper flights....”H is For Hawk pounced on my reading life like an owl on a vole. I was quite taken with that memoir and so were many others. We all waited for what Ms. MacDonald would do next and she finally delivers a collection of essays. Yes, the bulk of these pieces are bird and nature related but she also gives a personal glimpses of her life, including her struggles with migraines. Of course there are environmental warnings, as well, with dire warnings of what lays ahead. She is a fine writer, with a big, inquisitive mind, making this a worthy read. I hope the quotes I chose, give you a taste of what to expect.
    • 4/5
      We are in, what the scientists are calling, the sixth extinction. This is a man-made event due to our actions and inactions. Though McDonakd is aware of this, that is not the main focus of these wonderful essays."I hope that this book works a little like a Wunderkammer. It is full of strange things and it is concerned with the quality of wonder."/Si she goes on to show us the wonder, the magical that nature provides. From a field, where as a child she would lie face down to discover what was hidden beneath the grass, to magnificent bird nests. Watching the many birds that fly at night,from the Empire State building to mushroom picking in the wild, both with knowledgeable friends. A trip to observe an eclipse that she found both terrifying and awe inspiring. The personal, as she suffers from migraines and discusses how they affect her and a discussion of migraines themselves. There is so much more, and I loved each and every one.A look into the mystery, the wonder if nature, what is there to experience if we only open our eyes. What will be lost, if we don't protect and act now.
    • 5/5
      Some of these essays I had read when they appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, but those were a richer experience for being reread. The essays I had not previously read were a delight. Macdonald can be poetic, elegiac, dispassionate, autobiographical and insightful in very few words. I read through this book slowly, an essay a day with one or to days when I might have read two essays. They most of them deserve slow reading and reflection after reading.
    • 4/5
      Thanks to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for the ARC.I really really like Helen Macdonald's other books. There are several reasons for this. To begin with, you learn something about animal life in each book and I really like the way that she writes about how they behave I even like the way she kinda goes on and on about them. Her writing is smart and the descriptions of animal behavior are my favorite things about her books and especially Vesper Flights. This is such a good read. For those looking for a straight nature read this is not that. This is one of these nature-memoir books. It is not quite at all what John McPhee does, building a narrative structure about the journalistic story he is writing. Rather this is personal nature writing. Coming to this book unaware of Helen Macdonald will not do you any favors. I recommend reading a bit about who she is and why she has the credibility to write a book and books like this. I loved it but as ever I am not 100% in-touch with Helen's memoir portions. I find those, at times in this book, and often in others, tired and unrelatable. Others love those really personal moments and for me they fall flat. The nature parts and the reporting are just amazingly good and its a book I would read again, I have with her other books. Recommended!
    • 5/5
      I heard so much about Helen Macdonald's book H is for Hawk that I picked it up but had not had time to read it because of all my egalley reviewing. When I saw her book Vesper Flights I requested it--I would finally have to read Macdonald!The essays in Vesper Flights include a broad range of subjects including climate change, species extinction, migraine headaches, bird migration, and solar eclipses. The wonder of the natural world is beautifully experienced through Macdonald's words.When Macdonald talks about viewing the migration of birds from the top of the Empire State Building, I remembered one of the most extraordinary sights of my life. My husband and I were at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania when we saw the sky darkened with migrating birds, an endless stream that filled the sky! To this day, forty years later, I remember the dark silhouettes winging against a sky filled with streaks of dark clouds backlit by an autumn sun.A chapter that caught my attention describes her trek with Nathalie Cabrol, an explorer, astrobiologist and planetary geologist specializing in Mars. They went to the high altitudes of Antofagasta, Chile, to an environment that may be like that of Mars. "They higher we climbed, the further we'd go back in time--not on Earth, but on Mars," Macdonald writes.I love armchair travel that takes me to such extraordinary places. Cabrol takes the author to the desert salt flats and gypsum sands, a brutal environment with its dangerously high UV radiation, thin atmosphere, and volcanic activity."Above me, the Southern Hemisphere stars are all dust and terror and distance and slow fire in the night, and I stare up, frozen, and frozen in wonderment," MacDonald recalls.Cabrol says the Earth will survive us after we have destroyed what has made our existence possible. It offers little comfort to humans. But we ourselves have created this legacy.I have savored the book a little at a time, delving in when I need a break from the sad news of the world. I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
    • 5/5
      An enjoyable collection of essays that are a song to the benefit of observing everything in nature. Sometimes we can't get to places where nature rules, but we can hold it dear in our hearts. The author's descriptions are so clear that the reader feels as if watching and meandering alongside the author and appreciating everything more with her words. I loved it!I requested and received a free ebook copy from Grove Atlantic/Grove Press via NetGalley. Thank you!