The founding fish
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Author
Publication
2002 - Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, New York (State)
Language
English
Word Count
89,500 words, Guess
Page Count
358 pages
Identifiers
- Internet Archivefoundingfish00mcph
- Internet Archivefoundingfish0000mcph
- ISBN-100374104441
- ISBN-139780374104443
- LibraryThing269236
and 4 more
- Library of Congress Control Number2002025012
- OCLC Control Number49558590
- Better World Books9780374104443
- Open LibraryOL23246896M
Classifications
- LCCQL638.C64M4 2002
- LCCQL638.C64 M4 2002
Description
"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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