Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America

A pleasure to read. Previously I was dimly aware of Audubon's background beyond the acclaimed naturalist who painted life-size birds (if you ever get to see the original size of the folios, they are *massive). Who knew that he was a bastard son of a sea captain (inb4 "Hey should this be shoved at [a:Lin-Manuel Miranda|5725556|Lin-Manuel Miranda|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1439932375p2/5725556.jpg]?") and self-trained naturalist could go toe-to-toe with European zoologists and then some, yet at the same time build up his persona as a roguish American frontiersmen with embellishments and some outright zoological fabrications (the description of rattlesnakes as tree-dwellers, for example)?

I would have liked to see some of the prints show more referenced (especially those in the chapters' epigraphs), but there are plenty of other books for that. show less

An interesting and informative, if somewhat dismaying, semi-biography of audobon. Not sure when I'll be able to look at the drawings again without some of the gruesome scenes from the book clouding my vision

Not quite as good as Rhodes, but I liked this slightly better than Hart-Davis' book on Audubon. It's a more psychologically-based account than Rhodes' or Hart-Davis' books, but Souder stays out of the speculative realm (appropriately).