Word: mcphee
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...York for the unheroic task of closing TIME's story. The system in those days was that correspondents like me would send in voluminous "files" from which a staff writer would distill the polished piece that ran in the magazine. In this case the writer was John McPhee, who would go on to become a distinguished contributor to The New Yorker and author of 25 books, including "Coming into the Country" and "Annals of the Former World." John's story, to my chagrin, used only a few snippets of my material. But it was a breezy, bemused account that...
Name: Andie McPhee (“Dawson’s Creek”; Meredith Monroe)School: FAS Projected Year of Harvard Graduation: 2006 Capeside High Activities: Chairwoman of the Honor Council; assistant director of “Barefoot in the Park”; Yearbook staff (The Capeside Tricorn) Capeside High Honors: Class Valedictorian Quote: Overheard on a junior year visit to “Cambridge College”: “These students enjoy the distinction of attending America’s finest college. Founded...
...post at a vital crossroads in Virginia because a fellow officer had caught several shad for lunch. Thus was the Battle of Five Forks lost, and the course of the Civil War irrevocably altered. If The Founding Fish (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 358 pages) is any indication, had John McPhee been in command at Five Forks, he might have behaved likewise...
...McPhee, the Pulitzer-prizewinning author of Annals of the Former World, performs a series of virtuosic variations on the theme of shad, including its role in history, its heroic migratory habits--a single shad can travel 10,000 miles in its lifetime--and the author's sometimes excruciating attempts to catch the fish. "There is a God," he writes, gazing wistfully at his shadless line, "a God who knows what He is looking at and enjoys making decisions." (The emotion you're feeling right now is shad-enfreude...
...McPhee may not be the consummate angler, but he has a gimlet eye for the mot juste, as when he describes the "Cretaceous" look of a backhoe. If the book occasionally strays into arcane areas of fish biology more interesting to hardened pescophiles than general readers, the latter should just pick out those portions, like the bones of the shad itself. They'll still get a well-balanced and decidedly savory meal. --By Lev Grossman