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  • Technology, Policy, and a Passion for Shad:John McPhee, The Founding Fish
  • Jeffrey K. Stine (bio)

By nature and intent, the serious, literary nonfiction produced by John McPhee aims to reach a broad audience. His writings are unencumbered by the scholarly apparatus—footnotes, bibliographies, and the like—that characterizes academic historical publications. McPhee nevertheless offers important contributions to the history of technology. His careful research and reverence for accuracy are legendary. Every word counts in his essays; every line strives for clarity, insight, truthfulness. Moreover, because McPhee is writing for a general readership, he can freely add what professional historians fastidiously avoid: he can make himself part of the story; he can give personal testimony to the people and places he describes; he can dwell upon psychological elements and motives; and he can lace his accounts with humor.

Faithful readers of the New Yorker will be familiar with McPhee's essays, as he has been a regular contributor there for nearly four decades. Beginning with his portrait of Princeton University's basketball star and academic talent, Bill Bradley (A Sense of Where You Are [1965]), McPhee has turned his New Yorker pieces into book after masterful book. His oeuvre covers a remarkable range of topics, many of which address fundamental aspects of the interplay of technology and culture.

Encounters with the Archdruid (1972), for example, portrays one of the great defenders of wild lands, David Brower, as he clashes with three outspoken developers: the mining engineer Charles Park, who argues the case for mineral extraction wherever key deposits are found; resort builder Charles Fraser, who denounces the do-goodism of environmentalists; and Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy, who champions the construction of big dams. The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed (1973) tells the remarkable story of the secret development of a hybrid flying machine that blends [End Page 830] elements of airplanes and rigid airships. McPhee explores aspects of nuclear power, from weapons to propulsion to electricity generation, in The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor (1974). The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975) exemplifies how traditional technologies have been passed down through generations and how they have been shaped by their cultural and environmental settings.

The reciprocal influences among culture, environment, and technology interact on a much larger canvas in Coming into the Country (1977), where McPhee leads his readers on a mesmerizing journey through "America's ultimate wilderness," Alaska. Giving Good Weight (1979) includes essays that examine the multitude of variables associated with developing a nuclear power plant capable of floating in the open ocean, as well as the controversy surrounding the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers's proposal to impound one of New England's most scenic rivers. The Control of Nature (1989) tackles the intersection of technology and the environment head on by unmasking three larger-than-life attempts to harness some of the stronger forces on planet earth: preventing North America's largest river, the Mississippi, from shifting to its preferred (and shorter) path to the sea; trying to redirect the great lava flows in Iceland; and containing the devastating "debris flows" that slough off the steep and unstable shoulders of Southern California's San Gabriel Mountains. In Looking for a Ship (1990), to cite one last example, McPhee uses a month-and-a-half voyage on the S.S. Stella Lykes through the Panama Canal and down South America's Pacific Coast as a vantage point for observing the technological and social dimensions of operating a freighter within the now-anemic United States Merchant Marine.

McPhee's twenty-fifth book, The Founding Fish (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002, 368 pp., $24), covers one of the author's own consuming passions, shad fishing, together with humanity's interactions with this bony but delectable migratory fish. The book's title reflects the claim that an early-season shad run on the Schuylkill River in 1778 saved the starving army under George Washington's command at Valley Forge, and, in so doing, perhaps rescued the American Revolution itself. As in his other works, McPhee lards his subject with discussions of sport, culture, biology, myth, human...

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