Richard Rhodes - Other Prominent Works

Other Prominent Works

John James Audubon, published in 2004, is a biography of the French-born American artist, John James Audubon (1785–1851). Audubon is known for his life-sized watercolor illustrations of birds and wildlife, including Birds of America, a multi-volume work published through subscriptions in the mid-19th century, first in England and then in the United States. Rhodes also edited a collection of Audubon's letters and writings published by Everyman's Library (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)—The Audubon Reader.

Rhodes' 1997 book Deadly Feasts is a work of verity concerning transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE), prions, and the career of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek. It reviews the history of TSE epidemics, beginning with the infection of large numbers of the Fore people of the New Guinea Eastern Highlands during a period when they consumed their dead in mortuary feasts, and explores the link between new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD) in humans and the consumption of beef contaminated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly referred to as mad cow disease.

Rhodes's latest book was published in November 2011 and deals with the life and work of the Hollywood actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr.

Though less well known as a writer of fiction, Rhodes is also the author of four novels. Three of the four are currently out of print, but The Ungodly: A Novel of the Donner Party, his first, was reissued in a new edition in 2007 by Stanford University Press.