The Founding Fish

I enjoy nonfiction and John McPhee. As an audiobook, it's kind of neat to have John McPhee read it himself, but in printed book form it would be easier to skip over parts not of interest. This book contained many long fishing stories with too much minute by minute detail. Fishing fanatics might enjoy this - if that is you, then go for this book. I was expecting history, economics, science, and there was all that and much, much more. Making the darts, history of dams, biology of fish, deep sea fishing contests, many interesting topics and very comprehensive coverage. Now that I'm done, when I think back over what I learned, I do find it was worthwhile. But during the listening, I felt tortured at times.

John McPhee's books often start slow, but become steadily more and more interesting and informative as you go along. The Founding Fish mixes his obsession with fishing for shad with info on this amazing little fish, and it's importance in American History. Unfortunately the reader sounds like the slow kid in your third grade reading circle, making McPhee's slow story development unbearable. I can't get through it even after 4 determined tries. If you like McPhee, try The Pine Barrens, or Oranges, or Basin and Range, or The Delta Pumkinseed.

I just started this, and the reader (John McPhee) sounds awful. The sound engineers should have edited out all the breathing noises and the sound of his tongue arranging itself in his mouth. Awful. I'd really like to get my money back. My fault, I guess, because I didn't listen to the preview.

Hearing an author read his or her own work seems always to be somewhat of a trade off. You can hear a deeper connection with the material but the overall quality of the reading is not equal to some of the more skilled and practiced readers of audiobooks. It is clear that John McPhee is obsessed with shad. With such a long book on one subject I hoped for more history and cultural history (there is some) along with all the fish stories. Too much detail on things like shad skeletons and ichthyology for me. In printed format I could have easily skimmed those parts. In audiobook format that dull minutiae was unavoidable.

I would heartily recommend this to someone who loves to fish or to any devoted McPhee advocate. I happen to fit both of those checkboxes, but this book is probably not McPhee's best. The author still has juju: he still flares his unique ability to drill down into witty detail at the most unexpected moments like a peacock revealing a jeweled fan. Which is still highly alluring. Unless fishing just isn't your thing.

Always and ever.

The author narrated this, and he's very good at it. There are some annoying repetitive oratory pops in some sections that endure for entire chapters as if the speaker had a very dry mouth, but hearing him narrate his own book brings the listener closer in. The pace of the story seemed to stray occasionally into dry turf. Overall, the telepathic process of his writing was able to build grand pictures of the subject in my imagination.

Certainly. I can't wait to see a shad rise to a dry fly set in an a New England river some day.

Read it if you're a piscophile. Read it if you like McPhee's style.

McPhee at his absolute best! American Shad at its absolute best. Spell binding tale of the mastery
needed to hook American Shad, you WILL be hooked, even if you don't have the habit of fishing. If you
do have the habit, and you do have the good fortune
to hunt for The American Shad, these tales will make you wiser and crazier about the American Shad in our coastal waters. Good Luck