Word: shad
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...situation is so bad that many students have bought memberships at local fitness clubs like Wellbridge. But the $100-plus monthly fees are a luxury that not everybody can afford, and some undergrads have resorted to taking part-time jobs at the Business School’s Shad Gymnasium so they can gain access to the gorgeous facilities across the river. They find it well worth the effort. Shad has a cardio space about the same size as the MAC’s (but serving a population less than one-tenth the size), men’s and women?...
...will have to be raised and plans will have to be made to move the varsity volleyball, wrestling and fencing teams across the river. In the meantime, some interim measures have already been taken: in 2000, the Athletics department contracted with Boston Sports Clubs (the same group that runs Shad gymnasium) to take over the management of the facility, and much of the equipment in the weight rooms, as well as many of the aging cardio machines, were replaced...
...Founding Fish is a worthy addition to the newly popular genre of the one-fish book (joining Mark Kurlansky's best-selling Cod, among others). Its subject, the relatively unsung American shad, is a large and feisty fish found mostly in rivers in the northeastern U.S. It is the shad's misfortune to be excessively tasty--its scientific name is Alosa sapidissima, the latter word meaning "most savory." It is also notoriously bony: a Native American legend has the shad being created from a porcupine turned inside...
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...
...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