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The Founding Fish
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The Founding Fish Paperback - 2003

by McPhee, John

  • Used

Lauded as "a fishing classic" ("The Economist") upon its publication in hardcover, McPhee's 26th book is a braid of personal history, natural history, and American history, in descending order of volume.

Description

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Used - Like New. Like New condition. A near perfect copy that may have very minor cosmetic defects.
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With 3 stores less than 1 hour outside the DC/Metropolitan area (1 in Gaithersburg, 1 in Frederick and 1 in Hagerstown, MD), we have the largest selection of books in the tri-state area. Wonder Book and Video has been in business since 1980 and online since 1997. We have over 1 Million books for sale on our website and another 1 Million books for sale in our 3 locations. We have a very active online inventory and as such, we can receive multiple orders for the same item. We fill those orders on a first come first serve basis, but will refund promptly any items that are out of stock. Since 1980 it has always been about the books. ALL kinds of books from 95 cent children\'s paperbacks to five figure rare and collectibles. A merging of the old and new is where we started, and it is where we are today. Our retail stores have always been places where a reader can rush in looking for a title needed for a term paper that is due the next day, or where bibliophiles can get lost \"in the stacks\" for as long as they wish. In 2002 USAToday recognized us as \"1 of 10 Great Old Bookstores\", and we have been featured in numerous other newspaper and TV stories including Washington Post and CSpan.

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Details

  • Title The Founding Fish
  • Author McPhee, John
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition First edition
  • Condition New
  • Pages 368
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
  • Date September 10, 2003
  • Bookseller's Inventory # B20D-01670
  • ISBN 9780374528836 / 0374528837
  • Weight 0.85 lbs (0.39 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9 in (20.83 x 13.72 x 2.29 cm)
  • Library of Congress subjects American shad, Shad fishing - North America - History
  • Dewey Decimal Code 597.45

About this book

McPhee’s twenty-sixth book is a fascinating example of personal history, natural history, and American history in descending order. Every spring, American shad-Alosa sapidissima leave the ocean in groups of thousands and run distances upriver to spawn. 

John McPhee, a shad fisherman himself, recounts the shad’s role in the lives of George Washington and Henry David Thoreau. He fishes with and visits the laboratories of famous ichthyologists during which he takes instruction in the making of the darts from a master of the art, fishes in various North American rivers, and cooks shad in a variety of ways. In the words of Bill Pride for The Denver post, he "fishes the same way he writes books, avidly and intensely. He wants to know everything about the fish he's after, its history, its habits, its place in the cosmos"

First line

I hadn't been a shad fisherman all my days, only seven years, on the May evening when this story begins-in a johnboat, flat and square, anchored in heavy current by the bridge in Lambertville, on the wall of the eddy below the fourth pier.

First Edition Identification

This book was first published in 2002 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. This book is octavo with beige boards, black lettering on the spine, and a colorful dust jacket depicting shad by Sherman F. Denton. 


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Media reviews

Citations

  • New York Times, 09/14/2003, Page 28

About the author

John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. Also in 1965, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the years since, he has written nearly 30 books, including Oranges (1967), Coming into the Country (1977), The Control of Nature (1989), Uncommon Carriers (2007), and Silk Parachute (2011). Encounters with the Archdruid (1972) and The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

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