John Mcfee's The Founding Fish

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	• The Founding Fish John McPhee Amazon Remainders Account, 2002 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 34 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fish tales worth reading

I've never fished & have never wanted to. Who knew I could get so interested in finding out more & more about shad? But I enjoy John McPhee so much I'd probably pay good money to read what he has to say about watching paint dry.

The Founding Fish

This book is a classic about the American Shad. It covers fishing for shad, it''s biology, it's life cycle; just about everything about shad is in the book. Exciting to read and very informative. It's only deficiency is that it is not indexed- Joe Zaientz, Haddam Shad Museum.

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John Mcfee's The Founding Fish

Gift for my husband, who is fascinated. He loves the book!

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Biological McPhee

I've read plenty of McPhee, and liked it, but this was my favorite. Two reasons: 1) as a vertebrate biologist, I find fish even more interesting than rocks, canoes, and archdruids. 2) I used to live a half mile from the Delaware River, where much of the action of this book occurs.
McPhee mixes biology, history, personal (fishing) experience, and even cooking to create a synergy that's greater as a whole than the sum of its parts. I loved it. As always, the writing is crisp, clear, and crafted and the research is both broad and deep. McPhee's stuff is always about details, so people who want a breezy overview don't like him--their loss.

I can't help but shake my head in wonder at some of the negative reviews of this book here on Amazon. First, it seems ridiculous to criticize a BOOK for the way it's read aloud on the audio version. Second, anyone who can use the phrases "poorly worded" and "John McPhee" in the same sentence is, it seems to me, nuts. Finally, those who criticize the "preachy animal-rights" stuff (about 5 pages of the whole book) are clearly doing so only because they disagree with what they seem to think he concludes; McPhee gives his opinions on some controversial topics, and he backs them up with his reasons...this is not "preaching." I believe these critics fail a reading comprehension test anyway. McPhee is thoughtful and open-minded on the subject, and, unlike these critics, he tells you the sources of his research. He is well aware of the apparent contradiction between enjoyment of "playing" a fighting fish and admitting that fish feel pain...it's all right there in the book. In the end, McPhee is unwilling to give up his favorite pastime but concludes that it is less cruel to kill and eat his catch than to release a damaged animal to die slowly when out of his sight. If you're going to argue with that, you're going to have to provide your own sources and detail your own thought processes...McPhee does.

Anyway. In MY opinion, a great piece of nonfiction. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

John McPhee's twenty-sixth book is a braid of personal history, natural history, and American history, in descending order of volume. Each spring, American shad-Alosa sapidissima-leave the ocean in hundreds of thousands and run heroic distances upriver to spawn.

McPhee--a shad fisherman himself--recounts the shad's cameo role in the lives of George Washington and Henry David Thoreau. He fishes with and visits the laboratories of famous ichthyologists; he takes instruction in the making of shad darts from a master of the art; and he cooks shad in a variety of ways, delectably explained at the end of the book. Mostly, though, he goes fishing for shad in various North American rivers, and 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" (Bill Pride, The Denver Post). His adventures in pursuit of shad occasion the kind of writing--expert and ardent--at which he has no equal.

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