Description: In 1805, Jean Jacques Audubon fled violence in Haiti and France to take refuge in America. Ten years later, John James Audubon was a U.S. citizen reinventing himself as a naturalist and artist. The drawings he made in this decade, of specimens collected in France and in America, are published here for the first time in large format and full color.
Brief description: Richard Rhodes is the award-winning author of numerous works of nonfiction, fiction, and biography, including John James Audubon: The Making of an American, and The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Review Quotes: This is the first book to collect and reproduce the pastel, ink, and watercolor studies from early in [Audubon's] career--it's not hard to glean the first principle that makes his illustrations so effective: spareness. Although Audubon usually sketches in some contextual clues--a tree stump, some sand, three or four leaves--his pages are remarkably blank. What he is really studying is the bird, so Audubon surrounds the specimen--the osprey, the bullfinch, or the linnet--in white, letting his notes take care of the habitat, migration patterns, and the rest. Audubon preemptively limits the context, isolating and foregrounding the more salient details so we know at a glance what's important and what isn't.--Dushko Petrovich "Boston Globe" (8/24/2008 12:00:00 AM)