The Founding Fish » (First Edition)

John McPhee -- a writer with The New Yorker since 1965 -- writes about most anything that piques his interest, from California geology to the arc of a tennis ball to the construction of a birch-bark canoe. His beautifully articulated structures, clear prose, and participatory voice have become a model for other literary journalists, Norman Sims wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

John McPhee is a shad fisherman. He waits all year for the short spring season when American shad -- Alosa sapidissima -- leave the ocean and run up rivers to spawn. He has a catch-and-eat philosophy. After all, their name means "most savory.

Book Magazine

There are many descriptions one might give to the writing of Pulitzer Prize winner McPhee entertaining, wry, surprising, inventive but the quality most prominently on display in his newest work is uncompromising thoroughness. The book recounts the complete history of the delicious fish known as the shad not just of hunting, cleaning and eating the fish, but of the famous men who caught it (William Penn, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln among them), the writers who penned heartfelt tributes to it, the biologists and ichthyologists who try to uncover its secrets and the animal activists who fight on its behalf. It is likely that no one will ever write another book quite like this one, a book that manages to relate every possible snippet of shad lore while at the same time offering up humorous tales of the author's own fishing expeditions. The book will no doubt emerge as a must-read for those already enamored of shad. For the rest of us, it serves as an example of nonfiction writing at its finest intimate and suggestive, authoritative and convincing. Author Beth Kephart