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Tag Archives: Kay Redfield Jamison

H is for Hawk – Taming Grief?

23 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by Richard in Escapes and Pleasures

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

"H is for Hawks", "Nother Was the Same", "The Year of Magical Thinking", A Best Book of the Year, goshawks, grief, hawks, Helen MacDonald, Joan Didion, Kay Redfield Jamison, Memoirs, T.H. White


9780099575450-1-edition.default.original-1

(One of 10 Best Books of the Year, NY Times, Time Magazine, The Oprah Magazine, Library Journal, Amazon (20), etc., and also recommended by three MillersTime readers. Additionally, it was the winner of a number of prizes, including the Samuel Johnson Prize, the annual British prize for the best non-fiction writing in the English language and the Costa Book Award, one of the most outstanding books of the year written by authors based in UK and Ireland.)

I recently finished and was fascinated by the book H is for Hawk. Written by Helen MacDonald, it is a memoir about her grief at the loss of her father and the unusual way she ‘grieved’ in the year following his unexpected death.

Memoirs have always been a favorite form of non-fiction for me, especially well written ones, such as MacDonald’s. Generally, grief memoirs seem to take one of two forms: one written during the immediate time following the death of a spouse, parent, child, or friend or one written after the period of grief has passed. (One of my favorites of the first category is Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. For the latter category, and even more a favorite, I have read and reread Kay Redfield Jamison’s Nothing Was the Same.)

Written five years after her father’s death, MacDonald’s memoir falls into the latter category and recounts the extraordinary period of time in which she both lost and found herself.

H is for Hawk is actually three interwoven stories. It recounts the famous author T.H. White’s unhappy and unsuccessful experiences in trying to train a goshawk; it recounts MacDonald’s experiences with training her goshawk (Mabel) and attempting to deal with her grief, and it also tells the story of Mabel.

Of the three narratives, I found myself only moderately interested in White’s experiences, although they do give a good framework for MacDonald’s own experiences. Nor was I quite as absorbed in Mabel and the intricacies of falconry as some readers seem to be, although that is a large part of the H is for Hawk. For me, the most fascinating part of the memoir was MacDonald’s struggles with her grief, how she handled (mishandled?) that, and what she did and didn’t learn about herself and about her loss of her father.

As I usually do, I will leave the details and discoveries in the book to those of you who may yet read it.

HM.1I will add, however, that Ellen and I spent a wonderful evening last night at Politics and Prose Bookstore listening to and getting to know more about MacDonald. It was perhaps one of the best book talks we’ve attended. Within that one hour, we were treated to a wonderful summary of her book and numerous insights into MacDonald’s life, writing, and personality.

Some things we learned in the question and answer period:

  • Mabel has died. MacDonald now owns a parrot.
  • MacDonald is not currently ‘falconying,’ although she hopes to have time to return to it in the coming year.
  • Movie rights have been purchased to the book.
  • MacDonald was shocked by the wide spread response and success of her book and never dreamed it would have interest beyond a small audience.
  • It took her four days, which she described as very long, tiring, and emotionally draining, to make the audio recording of the book.
  • Writing about Mabel, even though done five years after the events recorded in the book, was the easiest part of the writing for her (and her best writing in my estimation).
  • MacDonald purposely left out the stories of her still living mother and brother, and even details about her father, as she didn’t want to tell their stories for them. The memoir is her story and her way to say goodbye to her grieving self.
  • H is for Hawk is a “language centered” book, in MacDonad’s words and also her way of telling the world about hawks and falconry.
  • MacDonald told the audience “Although they are killers, goshawks have no guile nor deceit and are honest and solitary.”

Much the same could be said of Helen MacDonald herself.

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“He Wanted the Moon”

26 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by Richard in Escapes and Pleasures

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

"An Unquiet Mind", "Darkness Visible", "He Wanted the Moon", bipolar disease, Dr. Abigail Zuger, Dr. Perry Baird, Eve Claxton, Kay Redfield Jamison, Mimi Baird, NYTimes, William Styron

24SCIBOOK-blog427

He Wanted the Moon: The Madness and Medical Genius of Dr. Perry Baird, and His Daughter’s Quest to Know Him. By Mimi Baird, with Eve Claxton. Crown. 272 pages.

The book is autobiography, biography, science, history and literature all in one, as instructive as any textbook and utterly impossible to put down.

from NYTimes review by Abigail Zuger, M.D.

If you’ve read William Styron’s small masterpiece Darkness Visible, you’ve ‘heard’ from a wonderful writer what “madness” is and what it feels like.

If you’ve read Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind, you know, from both a personal and a scientific perspective, what it is to experience bipolar disease today (manic depression).

Now comes a just released book, He Wanted the Moon, to add to those two wonderful insights into what it is like to experience mental illness. Or in the case of this book, what it was like to experience bipolar disease before we understood it or had any treatment for it.

This one has many of the strengths of the two previous books, and more. I indeed agree with the review quoted above that it is “autobiography, biography, science, history and literature all in one, as instructive as any textbook and utterly impossible to put down.” And, I would add, it is told in such a manner that you haven’t read anything quite like it before.

At least I haven’t.

Continue reading »

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Join Us to Hear Oliver Sacks and Kay Redfield Jamison

18 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by Richard in Escapes and Pleasures

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Tags

"An Unquiet Mind", "Hallucinations, "Life After Death? A Current Controversy", "Nothing Was the Same", "Proof of Heaven, Kay Redfield Jamison, Oliver Sacks, Sicxth & I St.

Two of my favorite authors in one place, talking to each other!

sacksPhysician, neurologist, Professor of Neurology at NYU’s School of Medicine and popular author Oliver Sacks will be at DC’s Sixth and I St. Synagogue on Wednesday, July 17th at 7 PM to talk about his book Hallucinations.

Published in 2012 and soon to be released in paperback (July 2, 2013) and large print (July 6, 2013), Hallucinations draws on Sack’s “own experiences, a wealth of clinical cases from among his patients, and famous historical examples ranging from Dostoevsky to Lewis Carroll…(and) investigates the mystery of these sensory deceptions: what they say about the working of our brains, how they have influenced our folklore and culture, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all.”

Kay.418490_342557112453890_506767284_nClinical psychologist, expert on bipolar disorder, Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and author* Kay Redfield Jamison will interview, or ‘converse’, with Sacks about his latest book and his views about this aspect of the brain and the wide ranging ways in which hallucinations are “part of the human experience.”

The interview/conversation will no doubt (hopefully?) include a discussion of Sack’s views that near death experiences, out of body experiences, etc. are related to how the brain works and are not what author Eban Alexander (The Proof of Heaven) writes and believes are in fact out of body experiences and ‘prove’ there are such things as journeys into the afterlife.

Jamison has said she has had a near-death experience and has said, “Mental illness can trigger religious revelations and visions — even out-of-body and near-death experiences”.

Ellen and I are going to Sixth & I on July 17th and have two additional tickets for two of you to join us. Let me know by email (Samesty84@gmail.com) if you are interested.

 

(*Jamison, who in addition to her more well known books, An Unquiet Mind, Manic Depressive Illness, Night Falls Fast, Exuberance, and Touched with Fire, has written what for me is one of the best memoirs I’ve read in many years, Nothing Was the Same, which, if you don’t know of it, bears checking out.)

(Also, see this earlier post on MillersTime, Life After Death? A Current Controversy where in Sacks and Alexander discuss their views on this topic and friend David P. Stang writes with great passion that Sacks doesn’t know what he’s talking about.)

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