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"It has not been long since the Florida peninsula was under water. Covered with sand, it is a limestone platform - like the Bahamas platform, the Yucatan platform. Now that it is up in the air, its topography and drainage patterns are somewhat bizarre. For example, it has an east-west divide and a north-south divide. The shorter one crosses the peninsula at the latitude of Tampa Bay. The longer divide, running down the axis of the peninsula, is known locally as the Ridge. Its high domains - the Apennines of Florida - rise to an altitude of two hundred and forty feet. For a hundred miles, oranges grow on the Ridge in a broad continuous ribbon."
If one had, by some fiat, to restrict all of John McPhee's writing to one paragraph, this excerpt from THE FOUNDING FISH would be a good representative example, something of a core sample of years of excellent prose. The reference to the Florida orange crop in the last sentence neatly encapsulates ORANGES, McPhee's epic 1967 writing on the classical, biological, economic and social history of oranges, written in that startlingly crisp and literate prose that is his hallmark. The discussion of Floridian geology is evocative of his masterpiece, ANNALS OF THE FORMER WORLD, a four-volume exploration of geology and the plate tectonics revolution that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1999. McPhee has written the authoritative texts on a dizzying array of topics, as varied as Alaska (COMING INTO THE COUNTRY), the merchant marine (LOOKING FOR A SHIP), and Bill Bradley (A SENSE OF WHERE YOU ARE).
THE FOUNDING FISH continues in this tradition. It is the definitive work on the American shad. There are, therefore, only two groups of readers who will be delighted by it; those who have heard of the American shad, and those who have not. The latter group would include, say, Southerners raised on catfish, those from the Western trout streams, and the ice fishermen of the Northern Lakes. The shad, like the salmon, is an ocean fish that swims into freshwater rivers to spawn, and is therefore common only on the East Coast and the West Coast.
Any further discussion of shad, and their ways, and their habits, and their lifecycle, and their savory taste would here be superfluous, if not downright rude. McPhee --- no slouch himself as a shad fisherman --- knows shad and their ways. John McPhee knows shad the way that Stephen Hawking knows physics, the way that Billy Graham knows the Bible, the way that Nolan Ryan knows the fastball. What he doesn't know, he has learned; the book is filled with discussions, consultations, and fishing trips with people for whom shad is a scientific study, a magnificent obsession, a way of life.
The book is as wide-ranging as the shad itself. McPhee takes us on expeditions to the Delaware River, the heartland of shad fishing, to the furthest extremes of the fish's range in the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia to the St. John's River in Florida. Along the way, the reader is treated to in-depth discussions of the shad's habits, its love life, its place in American history, and its place in American cuisine. (McPhee likes his shad fillets broiled, with lemon pepper.)
If THE FOUNDING FISH has a flaw, it is that it is not built around a central compelling personality. McPhee describes shad fishermen as unfailingly polite, and the people he talks to throughout the book are certainly polite, but they are not the sort of people you remember. Compared to the colorful geologists that play such an important role in ANNALS OF THE FORMER WORLD, the shad experts in THE FOUNDING FATHER are unassuming and quiet, almost anonymous.
THE FOUNDING FISH is longer than other of McPhee's books. Partly this is because it is so obviously a labor of love. Partly, also, it is because there is so much information crammed into its pages --- perhaps too much information --- especially in the chapter on fish dissection. But readers seeking clear exposition in crystalline prose about a topic on which they know nothing --- or everything --- will find THE FOUNDING FISH to be an exquisite, compelling experience.
--- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds (curtis@txreviews.com) writes movie reviews at http://www.txreviws.com/
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