Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

As wildlife disappears from the world at a cataclysmic rate due to climate change and habitat destruction, many find it necessary to reflect on humanity’s relationship with nature. In this stunning collection of short essays, the author of the bestseller H is for Hawk addresses the “constant grief” that now overlays an appreciation of the natural world like a fog. Yet Helen Macdonald also manages a rare feat: to not just use nature as a means of better understanding herself and society, but also to examine it as its own distinct entity. As she considers fox hunting, hares, fungi, boars, birds’ nests and beyond, her writing encourages readers to go out into the world and “rejoice in the complexity of things”—an act of both immersion and separation that, she shows, is essential in more ways than one.

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