Guardian Paperbacks of the week. 18 March 2017. Nicholas Lezard’s choice: NoWay But Gentlenesse by Richard Hines
Tag: Review
News – Paperback now available
The paperback edition of my memoir was published on 9th March 2017.
Guardian Paperbacks of the week. 18 March 2017. Nicholas Lezard’s choice: NoWay But Gentlenesse by Richard Hines.
As well as the paperback and hardback editions, No Way But Gentlenesse, is also available as an e-book, and there is an audio version, published by Isis Publishing, Oxford.
Further reviews have been added to the Review section of the website.
One from the Financial Times on January 8th 2017, by Keggie Carew, 2017 Costa Book Prize winner for her brilliant memoir Dadland.
The other, from the American website, Book Browse.
Review – Book Browse – Your guide to exceptional books
American book review website:
No Way But Gentlenesse. Critics’ opinion: Five stars.
Review – Keggie Carew, Financial Times
‘No Way But Gentlenesse by Richard Hines – I’ve just finished it and it was wonderful’
Keggie Carew, author of Dadlands, 2017 Costa Book Prize winner.
Review – Helen Macdonald
“This is a work of enchanting honesty and tenderness; it is as gentle and inspiring to the reader as a falconer is with his hawks. Hines has a deep and lifelong passion for birds of prey, creatures of implacable wildness which have nevertheless lived and hunted with humans for millennia. Full of fascinating detail about the training of raptors, and kestrels in particular, No Way But Gentlenesse is far more than a book on falconry. Rich with history and anecdote, lit with humour and passionate social concern, it gives us new insights into the making of one of our best-loved films. It speaks of love, family, history, and education, and illuminates how an obsession can enrich and shape one’s life. Reading it was a true pleasure”
Helen Macdonald, Author of H is for Hawk, Costa Book of the Year, 2014
Review – Peter Carey, Sunday Times
“Reading Richard Hines’s book is like seeing a myth captured and brought to earth … Completely absorbing. His descriptions are so vivid you feel close enough to reach forward and touch”
Peter Carey, Sunday Times
Review – Ken Loach
“Richard communicates his passion for falconry and for the landscape of his home town with great warmth. He played a great part in training the three kestrels who played ‘Kes’”
Ken Loach – Film Director
Review – Tim Dee – Book of the Week, The Guardian
“It is certainly worth having. And its plain-spoken and unflashy but eloquent account, as its title suggests, of all sorts of gentleness, first to do with the taming of meat-eating raptors, but then also related to Hines’ human kith and kin, runs deep into the literature birds and people … Hines’ sweet title comes from a seventeenth-century falconry manual. And gentleness sweetly pushes through much of this book”
Tim Dee – Book of the Week, The Guardian
Review – Sunday Express
“A thoughtful and evocative memoir … A must for H is for Hawk fans”
Sunday Express
Review – John Preston, The Daily Mail
“Kes … is regularly hailed as a classic of British cinema. But the story behind it turns out to be almost as good as the film itself … If the book is, in part, an account of [Barry and Richard’s] relationship, at its heart is another, rather more touching bond – the one Richard enjoyed with his kestrels. He has certainly taken his time writing it, but this is a poignant, vividly recollected account of an angry, agonised and apparently earth-bound boy learning, in one sense at least, how to soar”
John Preston, The Daily Mail