Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

First-time author Norton strikes a fine balance between memoir and nature essay in writing of her homecoming to the wellspring of her childhood memories, the Cedar River of Nebraska. She had come home to nurse the grief of having been raped and of trying to drown the memory of that horrible event in alcohol. "For long years I felt afloat without mooring, without anchor," she writes, until she finally returned to that lean and austere place of childhood pleasures. Her account of finding a psychic center among family and friends is affecting without being sentimental, and Norton writes warmly of the plants and animals that inhabit this place--cranes, curlews, sand roses, and other denizens of the High Plains--and of the people who work the land. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Growing up in a small Nebraska town, Norton had a magical childhood until her mother abruptly abandoned her family. Because of this and another traumatic event (shortly after college, she was raped and beaten by a stranger who left her for dead), life seemed meaningless, and for years she wandered aimlessly around the country, drinking, smoking pot, overeating and trying to run away from herself. In 1984, Norton returned for six months to the cabin on Lake Ericson in the Nebraska Sandhills, where she and her family had spent their summers, ostensibly to complete graduate school by writing about the place but actually to come to grips with her troubled past. Six years later, she went again to the Sandhills, this time to discover that the land she considered idyllic was suffering from its own problems?soil depletion, lakes fouled by farm chemicals, limited water resources. In this memoir, Norton recounts with disarming simplicity her attempts to find a purpose in life by returning to her childhood home, weaving her story together with sensitive descriptions of the windswept dunes, the vegetation, the wildlife and the people of the endangered Sandhills. Norton teaches writing at the Neahkahnie Institute in Oregon. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Picador USA (October 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312168616
• ISBN-13: 978-0312168612
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,184,594 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Paradise lost . . ., July 1, 2005

By	Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills (Hardcover)

Part memoir, part travelogue, Norton's book centers around her family's cabin on a small lake on the edge of the Nebraska Sandhills. The story is told in three parts: her childhood at the lake in the 1950s and 60s, a sojourn there in 1984 where she sets out to write a thesis and settles instead into a job at a small-town bar and becomes romantically involved with a man she meets there, and a return visit several years later as she crisscrosses the Sandhills gathering material for a book.

Read uncritically, the book is a rhapsody of appreciation for the beauty of the Sandhills and a story of recovery, from a violent sexual assault far from home and a subsequent period of hard drinking and restless wandering. It speaks of the healing powers of nature and of the search for a lost self through memories of childhood innocence.

Read more critically, the book often doesn't quite follow through with some of the themes it puts forward. I wanted to know more about her relationship with her mother after her parents' divorce, an event that shattered Norris' world. While her accounts of the men she came to know there as an adult (most of them cowboys who are predatory in their attraction to her) are vivid and unsettling, I would like to have learned more about how she came to feel safe with a man again and to love.

Her roaming around Nebraska in the last part of the book tends to be a catalogue of places seen without getting much beneath the surface of them. There's a little history, some talk of the impact of corn and cattle on the environment, and many references to the depletion of the great underground reservoir, the Ogallala Aquifer. But balanced against these larger issues, a reader may want for accounts of experiences that pierce through the abstractions to the living human drama they embrace.

I recommend this book for readers who like stories of personal journeys and recovery, especially as lived in remote and isolated places. Also recommended: Teresa Jordan's "Riding the White Horse Home," Mary Clearman Blew's "All But the Waltz," and Judy Blunt's "Breaking Clean."

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars powerful...about the healing power of place, May 13, 1999

By	[e-mail] "mawilke" (boise, idaho) - See all my reviews

This book was so much more than I had anticipated. I initially bought the book because it's about an area of the country that I know well. I found it to be a moving narrative about recovery and growth. It's about coming back from the edge. The author does a masterful job of explaining the healing power of home. I look forward to what she writes of next. This is a book by a woman that will be very readable by women, but not limited to women. Highly recommended.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Good Book About Life, Place, and A Healed Heart, December 30, 2007

By	Story Circle Book Reviews (www.storycirclebookreviews.org) - See all my reviews

Lisa Dale Norton writes about place. She writes about how place affects her, how place slowly and patiently healed her, about the wind, the water, the plants, the birds and the people of a certain place--the Nebraska Sandhills, filling the entire northcental part of Nebraska. And she writes even more specifically about Ericson, Nebraska, and her family summer home, the Big Six Country Club on Lake Ericson.

She writes lyrically about how much she loves the Sandhills, about the nature of the Sandhills and how she knows that she is only a secondary character is this vast hilly, sandy, treeless and marshy prairie. Interspersed between the stages of who she was and is are lovely vignettes from her notebooks about the unchanged, here, and the changing, there. By the end of the book, she wonders how long the water table will support the people she loves and the landscape she is passionate about.

But she also writes her own story, that of feeling abandoned by her mother as a young teen, about being attacked, raped and left for dead in her twenties and about her healing and regaining trust. "The things we do in our twenties and thirties are pilgrimages to find lost pieces of our youth." After years away from The Big Six Country Club, she returns to write her master's thesis on Ericson and The Hungry Horse Saloon. Although she writes in her journals and photographs life, she drifts through that summer and fall not knowing that she must wait and just be in that place for the healing to commence. Norton writes of equating growth with movement and finally realizing that inner landscape must be cultivated with stillness.

Norton's Notebooks are filled with prose poetry (the in-between vignettes). In "Dragonflies," she writes "Their gossamer wings moved like wind through riverside grass. Sometimes in flight, a dragonfly would coast, riding a current but only for a moment. I dreamed those magical creatures were relics from another age and I was some clever character, kneeling at water's edge gathering flowers."

In her narrative, she writes, "What succor is it, then, that rises from remembering, from the stories I tell? Slowly I come to believe that the mere telling itself is food for my soul. Story nurtures. I tell a story and I feel more whole."--as it is with us all.

Yet this is not a sweet and sentimental book. Norton writes with an edge of expectation, moving us forward to see the beginning of healing. She writes of the history of the land and the people as well as her family, long time Nebraska citizens. She writes, "What purpose do these stories serve, which rise from my childhood and haunt me as I travel these hills? I can not give up the belief that these memories, burning like lamps in the night shine through to me for a reason. Could it be a simple as the power of those things we love rising to remind us that we must name them? If I do not name those things I love, who will know what is worth saving and what can be let go?"

This is a good book. It tells of a life, a place and a heart that is healed.

by Judith Helburn
for StorycircleBookReviews
www.storycirclebookreviews.org
reviewing books by, for, and about women