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. 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.