The Founding Fish

This book was a bit of a slog for me. It was like listening in on someone's fishing diary - 'this other guy caught x number of shad, but I don't know how he did it because I didn't catch any'. Interspersed was a lot of information about the natural history, biology, ecology of shad, and some

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history thrown in as well. McPhee (the author) spent a lot of time with shad fishermen, shad scientists, and shad scientist fishermen, and described what he learned both in terms of fishing techniques and fishery science. Which normally would have interested me, but I felt was written rather dryly. One of the most interesting sections was the investigation about the importance of a bumper crop of shad to George Washington's Revolutionary Army during the winter of Valley Forge and the lack of supporting evidence for this perhaps apocryphal story.

Overall, it's alright, I didn't catch any major errors and I don't have any major criticisms, but most of the sections and for whatever reason just didn't really keep my interest despite initial enthusiasm.

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I learned a lot from this book--about shad, the history of shad fishing and eating, the damming of East Coast rivers, and more. But this is not McPhee's best, or maybe the fact that I do not fish and eat fish very rarely (usually in a tuna salad sandwich) just made this less interesting to me. I

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did not much enjoy the endless stories about him fishing--it was just like listening to a co-worker tell his longwinded fishing stories and just no thank you LOL. I did find the last chapter, Catch and Release, very interesting, but I have long thought that catch and release can't be good for the fish, and that fishing for fun and fight is cruel to the fish (as is laying them out to suffocate when keeping the fish).

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