The Founding Fish

McPhee’s twenty-sixth book is a fascinating example of personal history, natural history, and American history in descending order. Every spring, American shad-Alosa sapidissima leave the ocean in groups of thousands and run distances upriver to spawn. John McPhee, a shad fisherman himself, recounts the shad’s role in the lives of George Washington and Henry David Thoreau. He fishes with and visits the laboratories of famous ichthyologists during which he takes instruction in the making of the darts from a master of the art, fishes in various North American rivers, and cooks shad in a variety of ways. In the words of Bill Pride for The Denver post, he "fishes the same way he writes books, avidly and intensely. He wants to know everything about the fish he's after, its history, its habits, its place in the cosmos"