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January Meeting: Early Birds Book Club

The Early Birds will meet next on January 24 at 2 pm. We will discuss Gregory Nobles' biography, John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman. We have talked a lot about Audubon in the last few weeks since reading Creation by Katherine Govier. This biography may answer some of our questions. Nobles "shows us that Audubon's greatest creation was himself.... In exploring that performance, Nobles pays special attention to Audubon's stories, some of which—the murky circumstances of his birth, a Kentucky hunting trip with Daniel Boone, an armed encounter with a runaway slave—Audubon embellished with evasions and outright lies. Nobles argues that we cannot take all of Audubon's stories literally, but we must take them seriously. By doing so, we come to terms with the central irony of Audubon's true nature: the man who took so much time and trouble to depict birds so accurately left us a bold but deceptive picture of himself."

Jan 24, 2021 02:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)