On the Road with John James Audubon

I came to this book with expectations of being immersed in the biographical details of a man who loved the American wilderness. Durant and Hardwood surprised me, providing the reader with an unusual book, written with three voices, in which two modern-day naturalists/journalists followed in the wandering footsteps of Audubon, investigated his old haunts and compared remarks from his journals and letters with their own impressions of the modern landscape and surrounding culture. It was a journey through American, past and present, heaviyl annotated and personalized, a journal with two voices and a biography in one. I found the style fascinating, the trio of voices highly personal and rich; the writers were aware of their own subjectivity and neither exploited it nor suppressed it, but let each impression stand as it was. A testimony to a changing America. I found it interesting that Audubon himself, in his own time, foresaw the growing threat of urban and suburban sprawl and the way in which it would remove or alter the habitats of thousands of species. He knew from experience that the great plenteous multitudes of wild game only encouraged careless hunting for sport, and he remarked on the dwindling populations observed within his own lifetime. Audubon was a wild, reckless man in many respects, spending almost all of his time away from home, while his wife and children got by with what they could. He travelled north to Labrador, southwest to Louisiana, west to Montana and southeast to Florida. He traveled the Mississippi and the Ohio and tramped through innumerable forests and swampland, seeking to document every bird in the United States with his drawings. He shot birds to draw them, and ate them afterwards, and lived for months in the back country, eating campfire cooking and dropping back home again only for a brief stay, before returning to his wanderings. What a frustrating man to be married to! His had a sad end- as a youth he had been exceedingly winsome, with long, curling brown hair and penetrating dark eyes, virile and strong, an American woodsman in form and fashion. But thirty years of wandering takes its toll on the body, and at 60, he was already feeling the coming of the end. He had lost all of his upper teeth, his vision was so poor that he could no longer draw- which had been the passion of his life- and it was as if within a few years he just gave up inside. He was dead at 65. A startling end to someone who had been tramping around in the Northwest territories less than a decade before. After a long semester of duties, I simply devoured this book, reading its 622 pages in less than a week. Even more than the information I gained about Audubon himself, I really learned a lot from the writing style which the authors used to record their experiences. After all, their method of investigation was really unusual and does not lend itself well to book-writing: they spent 13 months or so traveling around the

I couldn't disagree more with the last reviewer. I read this book more than ten years ago and it is still the best source of information on the life of Audubon, as well as the most enjoyable read in the large Audubon literature. It fired my interest in Audubon more than any other book. The fact that the authors contemplate the people, places, plants, and birds that they found in Audubon's path -- and the changes that have taken place over nearly 200 years -- only adds to the book's value. This is history (natural and biographical) in 3D, and brings Audubon to life like no other book about him.