William Souder

Meticulous detail, natural poses, and—most startling—life-sized renderings made John James Audubon’s Birds of America a groundbreaking work in the formerly staid world of nineteenth-century ornithology. Today, William Souder’s biography of Audubon, Under a Wild Sky, paints the larger-than-life portrait of the man behind the famous illustrations, who was far more interesting than his role as the über-birdwatcher implies. Souder follows his subject, a “self-taught painter and self-anointed aristocrat,” as he travels from an illegitimate childhood in Haiti to the wilderness of Kentucky and elite scientific circles on the East Coast and in Europe. Souder peppers his rich prose with tangents on American history, natural history, and environmentalism, which should be no surprise coming from an author whose last book, A Plague of Frogs, chronicled Minnesota’s outbreak of frog deformities in the late nineties. Bound To Be Read, 870 Grand Ave., St. Paul; (651) 646-2665; www.boundtoberead.com. Valley Bookseller, 217 N. Main St., Stillwater; (651) 430-3385