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"The Founding Fish, John McPhee's twenty-sixth book, is a braid of personal history, natural history, and American history, in descending order of volume. McPhee is a shad fisherman. He waits all year for the short spring season when delicious American shad - Alosa sapidissima - leave the ocean in hundreds of thousands and run up rivers heroic distances to spawn. He approaches them with a catch-and-eat philosophy. After all, their specific name means "most savory."".
"McPhee presents his obsession in bold and spirited prose, laced with humor. His research illuminates the sometimes surprising relevance of this fish in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, and its unique appeal to imaginative historians. George Washington was a commercial shad fisherman - in 1771, he caught 7,760 American shad. The fish had a cameo role in the lives of Henry David Thoreau and John Wilkes Booth.
Planked shad (shad nailed to a board and broiled before an open fire) was invented by the Colony in Schuylkill, a Philadelphia fishing club founded in 1732, which now considers itself the fourteenth of the fifty-one united states."--BOOK JACKET.
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Subjects
Shad fishing, American shad, American shad., History, Fishing, north americaPlaces
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Book Details
First Sentence
"I hadn't been a shad fisherman all my days, only seven years, on the May evening when this story begins-in a johnboat, flat and square, anchord in heavy current by the bridge in Lambertville, on the wall of the eddy below the fourth pier."
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- Created April 29, 2008
- 7 revisions
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May 26, 2011 | Edited by Sai Shankar | merge authors |
August 5, 2010 | Edited by IdentifierBot | added LibraryThing ID |
April 24, 2010 | Edited by Open Library Bot | Fixed duplicate goodreads IDs. |
April 16, 2010 | Edited by bgimpertBot | Added goodreads ID. |
April 29, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record. |