Product Description

John James Audubon came to America as a dapper eighteen-year-old eager to make his fortune. He had a talent for drawing and an interest in birds, and he would spend the next thirty-five years traveling to the remotest regions of his new country–often alone and on foot–to render his avian subjects on paper. The works of art he created gave the world its idea of America. They gave America its idea of itself.

Here Richard Rhodes vividly depicts Audubon’s life and career: his epic wanderings; his quest to portray birds in a lifelike way; his long, anguished separations from his adored wife; his ambivalent witness to the vanishing of the wilderness. John James Audubon: The Making of an American is a magnificent achievement.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #221795 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-11
• Released on: 2006-04-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Born in 1785 in Saint Domingue (now Haiti), the bastard son of a French naval officer and a chambermaid, Audubon was taken to France by his father and then sent to America in 1803 to escape conscription into Napoleon's army. He began drawing birds as a child, and in America this passion grew into an obsession. His business ventures failed, and he was often short of money, but for him, birds overshadowed everything except his devotion to his wife, Lucy, who encouraged him in all his endeavors and supported the family when he went on quests for new birds to paint. Traveling into the American wilderness, Audubon, completely at home on the frontier, observed birds endlessly, and in 1826 set off for Europe to spend years promoting his multi-volume Birds of America. His life makes an engaging story, and Pulitzer Prize winner Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb) chronicles every aspect of it, the commonplace as well as the audacious, in this thoroughly researched biography. Rhodes's prose style is subtle, enlivened by passages from Audubon's own letters and journals, and he presents an agreeable picture of a man who charmed almost everyone he met, remained devoted to his wife even though he abandoned her for years at a time and was not above lying about his birth and other details of his life. Perhaps most important, Rhodes succeeds in shedding light on how Audubon perfected his ability to capture in his depictions of birds so much life and emotion that they transcend traditional wildlife painting. Illus. throughout; 16 pages of photos not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Scientific American
"The sharp cries of gulls wheeling above the East River docks welcomed the handsome young Frenchman to America." Born in 1785 the illegitimate son of a French planter on Saint Domingue (now Haiti) and raised in France, the handsome young man transformed himself into the consummate American. Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, traces this journey with insight ("studying birds was how he mastered the world, and himself") and vivid language. In particular, Audubon's wife, Lucy--a beautiful, adventurous Englishwoman whom he met shortly after arriving in America--emerges as a full, and patient, partner in Audubon's single-minded enterprise to develop a technique that would breathe life back into the birds he drew and to catalogue the birds of North America in a "collection not only valuable to the scientific class, but pleasing to every person." The book includes several color reproductions to remind us just how well Audubon succeeded. If this biography inspires you to read more about birds, two other recent books stand out: The Race to Save the Lord God Bird, by Phillip Hoose (Melanie Kroupa Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), and On the Wing: To the Edge of the Earth with the Peregrine Falcon, by Alan Tennant (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

Editors of Scientific American

From The New Yorker
In 1838, when Audubon completed "The Birds of America," a monumental work whose flagstone-like pages require two people to turn them, he estimated that its production had cost him a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars, the equivalent of two million dollars today. He raised the money himself, tramping through America and England in search of sponsors, and leaving his family behind for years at a time. His spur was humiliation: French by birth, he had gone bankrupt on the Kentucky frontier, and he decided that his gift for drawing and his affinity for birds could restore his dignity and fortune. Rhodes occasionally lingers too long on his subject's publishing difficulties (a pet peeve of many authors), but he conveys both the singular glories of the early American wilderness—a sycamore tree crowded with nine thousand swallows—and the solitary desperation of Audubon's labors.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Better than fiction
The life of John James Audubon could have been a historical novel. This West Indian French bastard survived revolutions, wars, earthquakes, floods, economic collapses, and epidemics. He called everywhere in North America, as well as Europe and the Caribbean, his home. He combined entrepreneurial skills with a love of the outdoors and the gifts of the naturalist and artist (not to mention hunter). His equally-amazing English-born wife Lucy took to the frontier as readily as he, raising a family and providing frontier hospitality wherever their fortunes took them.

A biographer or historian may lack a novelist's eye for the kinds of background details that make the past come alive to the reader. But Richard Rhodes has immersed himself in his subject's world. He's read everything, not only what Audubon himself wrote, but also what his family, acquaintances, and others who experienced the same things wrote. Suppose you'd been in New York City on 9/11 but hadn't written much about your experience. A future historian might use the descriptions by others who were there too to fill in the gaps. That's what Rhodes has done for Audubon.

Before this book, Rhodes was known for his Pulitzer-winning history of the development of the atomic bomb. Now he's known as Audubon's biographer, having edited the Everyman's Library edition of The Audubon Reader and contributed an introduction to the forthcoming Audubon: Early Drawings. This is a remarkable book by someone who really knows his subject, his period, and his craft as writer and historian.

MAGNIFICENT!
This book is nothing short of MAGNIFICENT! Rhodes is an elegant writer who knows and loves his subject as well as history and gets it all right. This is more than the biography of one brilliant man; it is a history of frontier America in its early days and is populated with much more than birds. There are Indians, friends, enemies, 4-legged animals, and yes, loads and loads of American birds. The voyages back and forth from Europe to America are enlightening and amazing to think about. I knew next to nothing about birds when I bought this book; I bought it because of an interesting book review I read a couple of years ago.

There is another Audobon book that came out the same year, Under a Wild Sky by Souder, and I own that book, too. The Souder book was a finalist for the Pulitzer, but I really don't know how it could have been selected over this book by Richard Rhodes. For example, this book goes into all the details of Audubon's personal life right up to his last days on earth, whereas the Souder book covers most of it in a few paragraphs at the end of his book.

I LOVED this book! I had a couple of bird books next to my chair as I was reading (one, a condensed version of Audubon's Birds of America), and referred to them throughout reading, which was fun and very enlightening and educational. Audubon knew and loved his birds so well that he even wrote biographies of individual species, and indeed individual birds themselves! What could be more amazing than that?

This is a truly delicious book that I wish more people would read. Right now there are only 18 individual reviews, which is much less than this book should have. I always blame the publishers for not doing justice to the fabulous books they are entrusted with. Do yourself a favor and read this special book! It is about a great man, yes, but also covers so much more. In these days of being green, Audubon predicted (and saw the beginnings of) the sad ruination and ultimate demise of nature in all its forms, and that was in the early 1800s. He was a pioneer as well as a bright man, and a funny man, and a driven man who loved and adored his family and his birds.

Tenacity Incarnate
In its own way, this book reveals as much about the early 'natural history' years of the nation's founding as "Roots" does about early 'social history' years of Americans' tangled involvement with its imported slave population. Just as a national audience sat transfixed before TV sets watching a human drama unfold, so too, a reader following Audubon's manic treks back and forth from the East Coast to Louisiana to capture and sketch American birds, and his inspired obsession develop and finance a folio of ornithological plates by selling subscriptions in England, would marvel first at his tenacity, second at his self-awareness, and finally recognize that we live in a much less fecund animal world than the one he captured.

Audubon was an innovator of the first rank, in devising a systematic methodology (wire-frame supports) for accurately posing the bird in its natural setting, and a keen observer of the world he was both illustrating and helping to eradicate. Throughout his collecting and drafting career, he noted the transformations of habitats and ranges, and recognized that the 'natural' world he knew would look very different after his death. Large-scale conversion of woodlands to other uses, and the relentless pressure of colonization, exerted a profound impact on the distribution and range of avian species, and Audubon watched it happen in real time. His descriptions of the 'bird counts' he conducted tell the story. Repeatedly, he describes flocks that 'blacken the sky' - something we'll never see today.

Rhodes' biography is exhaustive, and a review should note that there is quite a bit of superfluous detail brought into the description of his early years. Furthermore, Rhodes in this effort did not turn out to be a great prose stylist, so some serious editing for length would have helped. Those criticisms aside, the Rhodes biography succeeds in bringing to life a vanished world, one in which colonists, pioneers and settlers were surrounded by 'wild nature,' and most of the people could actually name the animals (and birds) they saw!