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• Mcphee, John

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.

McPhee fishes with and visits the laboratories of various ichthyologists, including a fish behaviorist and an anatomist of fishes, he takes instruction in the making of shad darts from a master of the art; and he cooks shad and shad roe in a variety of ways, delectably explained at the end of the book. Mostly, though, he goes fishing for shad in various North American rivers -- in Florida, in Maritime Canada, but especially in the Delaware River, nearest his home, where he stands for hours in stocking waders and cleated boots, or seeks pools below riffles and rapids in a canoe. His adventures in pursuit of shad occasion the kind of writing -- expert and ardent -- at which he has no equal.

John McPhee is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His previous book, Annals of the Former World, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1999.