by Kenn Kaufman
Absolutely a hundred stars in every regard! Even the narrator was brilliant.
I can only guess that the reason some people gave it less than 5 stars on Goodreads (it averaged 4.13) was that they wanted him to hate on Audubon for his failures--racism, plagiarizing, theft, giving different names to different specimens of the same bird, and other lapses of science--and he didn't. He didn't gloss over them either, simply explained what happened and put it in perspective for the times in which Audubon lived and the state of science at the time.
For example, Audubon's naming a bird in honor of a prospective sponsor, even though he'd already named the same yellow warbler something else (several times!), could have been a deliberate deception or a minor failure of memory, spurred by the strong desire to get his work published. Owning and selling slaves, well, that's what white guys did back then. We could wish he'd "risen above the norm", as Kaufman suggests, but not blacklist his entire life's work on that account.
Kaufman goes off topic a lot, talking about topics like the science of bird study and how it has changed; the patterns of bird movement and extinction; island fauna; and his own attempts to draw Audubon-style paintings of some of the missed birds. And lots of other stuff. Some people may have griped that he didn't stick to the topic, but he did--this was all important to understanding what Audubon saw and what he didn't. (Except maybe Kaufman's art attempts, but I found that to be an amusing sideline)
Great writing; great research; great, great book!
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