The Founding Fish by John McPhee, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, ISBN 0374104441 Reviewed by John Bonner
PULITZER prizewinner John McPhee’s natural and social history of the American shad swims in the wake of similar fishy biographies of the cod and eel. McPhee’s subject is the largest of the herring family, Alosa sapidissima, a species that spends most of its life in the Atlantic but returns to its native river to spawn. Much prized for its flesh and roe – as it still is – the shad arrived in such numbers that it was used for fertiliser, until dams built on many rivers on America’s East…
