20s & 30s book club: The Founding Fish

Activity Type: Social | Local Socials
Difficulty: 1 - Accessible
Trip Leader(s): Catherine Bentsen
Registration Type: Registration
Please Click Here to RSVP: https://activities.outdoors.org/a5UVX0000011Jxh
Audience: 20’s & 30’s

Description: Join AMC Boston 20s & 30s for a nature-themed book club! The book club is held roughly every other month on topics of nature, wildlife, and the environment. In anticipation of America's 250th anniversary this year, our April and June books will explore the intersection of America's history and natural resources. For our April book, we will read the book “The Founding Fish" by John McPhee. Discussion will be held on Tuesday, April 7 from 7-9pm at Notch Brewing in Brighton. Anyone is welcome to join, whether you’ve read all, part, or none of the book! An interest in the book topic is the only prerequisite for joining.
Synopsis: John McPhee's twenty-sixth book is a braid of personal history, natural history, and American history, in descending order of volume. Each spring, American shad-Alosa sapidissima-leave the ocean in hundreds of thousands and run heroic distances upriver to spawn. McPhee--a shad fisherman himself--recounts the shad's cameo role in the lives of George Washington and Henry David Thoreau. He fishes with and visits the laboratories of famous ichthyologists; he takes instruction in the making of shad darts from a master of the art; and he cooks shad 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, and 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" (Bill Pride, The Denver Post). His adventures in pursuit of shad occasion the kind of writing--expert and ardent--at which he has no equal.

Reminder: Please click the RSVP link above to register!