Founding Fish Maybe a party is just

Maybe a party is just not the place for them

No matter who you're talking to

Modern parenting is defined by an unprecedented level of overprotectiveness: parents who rush to school at the whim of a phone call to deliver forgotten assignments

and by controlling how you communicate every day

Yet even the festive atmosphere can't keep the shadows of the past from looming

Founding Fish Maybe a party is justJohn 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;