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John James Audubon: The Making of an American. By Richard Rhodes. (New York: Knopf, 2004. x, 514 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-375-41412-6.)
Richard Rhodes, winner of a 1988 Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), has written another splendid book, this one about one of the most heralded but, in many ways, unstudied characters in American history: the artist, naturalist, and writer John James Audubon. The outline of Audubon's story is well known, and it is not as if Audubon has not been the subject of numerous books; more than one hundred have been published about him since his death in 1851, including his journals and two volumes of letters, Francis Hobart Herrick's pioneering two-volume narrative in 1917, Alice Ford's long-standard biography in 1964 (revised in 1988), and, in the last two years, a novel and three new biographies. But Audubon is...