{"product_id":"under-a-wild-sky-copy","title":"Under a Wild Sky","description":"\u003cp\u003eGood+ used hardcover in dust jacket.  Cloth beginning to peel on back board.  Shelf wear and sun fading to spine of DJ.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the century and a half since Audubon's death, his name has become synonymous with wildlife conservation and natural history. But few people know what a complicated figure he was--or the dramatic story behind The Birds of America.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBefore Audubon, ornithological illustrations depicted scaled-down birds perched in static poses. Wheeling beneath storm-wracked skies or ripping flesh from freshly killed prey, Audubon's life-size birds looked as if they might fly screeching off the page. The wildness in the images matched the untamed spirit in Audubon--a self-taught painter and self-anointed aristocrat who, with his buckskins and long hair, wanted to be seen as both a hardened frontiersman and a cultured man of science.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn truth, neither his friends nor his detractors ever knew exactly who Audubon was or where he came from. Tormented by a fog of ambiguities surrounding his birth, he reinvented himself ceaselessly, creating a life as dramatic as his fictionalizations of it. But when he came east at thirty-eight--broke and desperate to find a publisher for his Birds--he ran squarely into a scientific establishment still wedded to convention and suspicious of the brash newcomer and his grandiose claims.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt took Audubon fifteen years to prevail in both his project and his vision. How he triumphed and what drove him is the subject of this gripping narrative.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"North Point Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53321096429875,"sku":"DK6714U","price":9.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0888\/4515\/6659\/files\/thumbnail.jpg?v=1777916716","url":"https:\/\/buteobooks.com\/products\/under-a-wild-sky-copy","provider":"Buteo Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}