These books delve into historical fires, like those currently ravaging California, and the people affected by them.
FIRE SEASON
Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout
By Philip Connors
246 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. (2011)
In 2002, Connors quit his job as a copy editor at The Wall Street Journal to become a lookout for the United States Fire Service or, as he calls it, “a professional watcher of mountains” amid “a landscape prone to burn.” He chronicles the fire season in the mountains of the Gila National Forest in New Mexico in 2009, from April to August. Each chapter covers one month, and Connors draws from his field notes to deliver a piece of nature writing that our reviewer described as “finely, wryly” and “at times poetically wrought.” He channels Thoreau in his proselytization of nature, writing, for instance, “Every day in a lookout is a day not subtracted from the sum of one’s life.” He also recounts the “long and illustrious” list of writers who have taken up ”lookoutry” posts, and gives historical insight into how the Gila came to be protected and how wildfires can be both a creative and destructive force.
YOUNG MEN AND FIRE
A True Story of the Mann Gulch Fire
By Norman Maclean; Foreword by Timothy Egan
352 pp. University of Chicago Press. (2017)
This thoroughly researched book pieces together what happened on Aug. 5, 1949, when 15 of the United States Forest Service’s firefighters, dubbed Smokejumpers, descended into Mann Gulch in Montana to fight a forest fire, only for 13 of them to wind up dead within hours. The author travels to the Gulch with the two survivors to reconstruct that day and answer questions such as whether a secondary “escape fire,” meant to help save the men, actually worsened the situation. He uses this story to reflect on his own mortality. And “his heroic tragedy may even rescue some of the living,” wrote our reviewer. This 25th anniversary edition includes a foreword by Times contributing Op-Ed writer Timothy Egan.
THE STARS ARE FIRE
By Anita Shreve
256 pp. Knopf. (2017)
Based on the true story of the 1947 fires that wiped out more than 200,000 acres of land in Maine, this novel follows a young mother, Grace Holland, after her husband, Gene, leaves to become a volunteer firefighter. Gene is last seen walking into a wall of flames, and Grace is left to care for their son and daughter, forging forward after her home and town are destroyed. The fire offers both disaster and opportunity, as Grace discovers a newfound freedom to explore new romantic prospects and her own career. Our reviewer wrote: “Shreve has a gift for making the mundane engaging,” comparing her to Liane Moriarty for her penchant for “spicing up domestic doings in beachfront settings with terrible husbands and third-act twists.”
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