James Audubon Killed All The Birds He Painted

   One of America's great naturalists, John James Audubon painted highly realistic portraits of practically every type of bird in North America. The self-taught artist's resulting four-volume collection of life-size paintings, The Birds of America (1827-38), is regarded as both an artistic and an ornithological masterpiece, and reproductions of his work are still brightening walls around the world.
   But exactly how Audubon was able to capture our feathered friends' likenesses so completely is usually glossed over. The Encyclopedia Britannica fails to even broach the subject. The Audubon Society's page on their namesake mentions that he loved the hunt, but the connection is never explicitly made. Audubon shot all the birds he painted. He then used wires to pose the corpses of these hawks, falcons, partridges, sparrows, woodpeckers, and other winged creatures before putting brush to canvas. In one diary entry, he writes about sneaking up on a large group of sleeping pelicans and blasting two of them before his gun jammed and the awakened survivors took off (he was disappointed that he didn't get to kill them all). And when hunting snoozing avians in the wild was too much trouble, he resorted to other methods. He once bought a caged eagle, killed it, then captured its likeness.
   One of Audubons biographers, Duff Hart-Davis, reveals: "The rarer the bird, the more eagerly he pursued it, never apparently worrying that by killing it he might hasten the extinction of its kind."
   Over 1,000 individual birds appear in Audubon's paintings, but we know that the body count is much higher. He didn't feel some kills worthy of being painted. Others were put on canvas, but the artist was dissatisfied with his work and never displayed it. In other cases, he had already painted a specific type of bird but then found an intriguing individual variation, so he just had to blow it away.
   He once wrote: "I call birds few when I shoot less than one hundred per day."
  

Gandhi Refused To Let His Dying Wife Take Penicillin, Yet Took Quinine To Save Himself

   Gandhi is often ranked, directly or subtly, alongside Jesus Christ, and Martin Luther King Jr. as one of the greatest peacemakers---indeed, one of the greatest human beings---of all time. The mythology that surrounds him---which he built, leaving his followers, admirers, and hagiographers to reinforce and embellish---has almost completely smothered the many unflattering facts about him. In such a compact book, space doesn't permit a full exploration of Gandhi's numerous, consequential skeletons---his racism toward blacks and whites, his betrayal of the Untouchables, his acquiescence toward the Nazis. Instead, lets focus on something more personal and, in fact some ways, more upsetting.
   In August 1942, Gandhi and his wife, Kasturba, among others, were imprisoned by the British in Aga Khan Palace near Poona. Kasturba had poor circulation, and she'd weathered several heart attacks. While detained in the palace, she developed bronchial pneumonia. One of her four sons, Devadas, wanted her to take penicillin. Gandhi refused. He was okay with her receiving traditional remedies, such as water from the Ganges, but he refused her any medicines, including this newfangled antibiotic, saying that the Almighty would have to heal her.
   The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi quotes him on February 19, 1944: "If God wills it,  He will pull her through." Gandhi: A Life adds this wisdom from the Mahatma: "You cannot cure your mother now, no matter what wonder drugs you may muster. She is in God's hands now." Three days later, Devadas was still pushing for the penicillin, but Gandhi shot back: "Why don't you trust God?" Kasturba died that day.
   The next night, Gandhi cried out: "But how God tested my faith!" He told one of Kasturba's doctors that the antibiotic wouldn't have saved her and that allowing her to have it "would have meant the bankruptcy of my faith." (Emphasis mine.)
   But Gandhi's faith wasn't much of an obstacle a short time later when it was his ass on the line. A mere six weeks after Kasturba died, Gandhi was flattened by malaria. He stuck to an all-liquid diet as his doctors tried to convince him to take quinine. But Gandhi completely refused and died of the disease, right? No, actually, after three weeks of deterioration, he took the diabolical drug and quickly recovered. That stuff about trusting God's will and testing faith only applied when his wife's life hung in the balance. When he needed a drug to stave off the Grim Reaper, down the hatch it went.