The Founding Fish

Starred review from August 26, 2002
In his newest (after Annals), McPhee leads readers out to the river—pole and lures in hand—to angle for American shad. McPhee knows where the fish are running, so to speak, and he opens with a tall tale about his long vigil with a giant roe shad on the line. Night falls, a crowd gathers on a nearby bridge to watch and still the fish refuses to roll over; however embellished, it's a comic story. He then probes the natural history of the shad, known as Alosa sapidissima
and traces the fish's storied place in American history and economics. The shad manages to turn up, at least in legend, at George Washington's camp at Valley Forge; it waylaid Confederate General Pickett in the defense of Richmond and hastened the end of the Civil War; it even played a minor role in John Wilkes Booth's murder of Lincoln. McPhee consults specialists like a fish behaviorist, an anatomist of fishes and a zooarcheologist who studies 18th-century trash pits to see whether Washington indeed ate shad at Mount Vernon. The author studies under a master shad dart maker and in an appendix gives recipes, too. McPhee reaffirms his stature as a bold American original. His prose is rugged, straightforward and unassuming, and can be just as witty. This book sings like anglers' lines cast on the water. It runs with the wisdom of ocean-going shad.

June 15, 2002
McPhee does for the shad what he does with everything else: he makes these spawners of the mighty Delaware really interesting.

Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2002
In his latest, Pulitzer Prize winner McPhee shares his deep pleasure in shad fishing in spite of his modest catches, wittily complains about his most despised fishing competitor, shares his awe over champion shad-catchers, and profiles intrepid fish biologists he accompanies both in the lab and out in the field. But being a scholarly sort, he not only pursues shad with dart and pole but also stalks them in the annals of history in a far-reaching chronicle similar to Mark Kurlansky's popular "Cod" (1997). At the heart of this enlightening portrait of a fish that also won the admiration of Thomas Jefferson and Henry David Thoreau is McPhee's gleeful dissection of the belief that the humble shad--a migrating fish that once turned East Coast rivers turgid with spawning runs so enormous fishermen could drive them into nets like cattle into corrals--helped George Washington win the revolution by feeding his starving troops. McPhee is in great form here, as informative as always but also funny, unusually self-revealing, and quite passionate in his discussions of the dire effects dams have had on shad and rivers alike, and the troubling realization that catch-and-release fishing "may be cruelty masquerading as political correctness." (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)