Publishers Weekly
This collection of two long and two short essays on U.S. wildfire fighting displays the excellent reporting skills that made Maclean's first book, Fire on the Mountain, a dazzling and popular success. While his earlier book gained much of its storytelling strength from its focus on one incident, Colorado's South Canyon fire of 1994, Maclean's new work is less unified, held together not by a grand idea but primarily by the author's interest in aspects of fire; consequently, the book never becomes more than the sum of its parts. The longest section is a reconstruction of the 1953 rattlesnake fire in California's Mendocino National Forest, which killed 15 wildland firefighters. Maclean's dogged pursuit of reconstructing some key assumptions about the fire makes this a thriller in disguise. The highlight of the book is the second long piece on the 1999 Sadler fire in Nevada, which displays all the power of his earlier work through a highly charged and exciting account of a firefighting crew's disastrous encounter with an uncontrollable fire. Two smaller essays, however-one on the last survivor of the 1954 Mann Gulch fire, which Maclean's father, Norman, wrote about in Young Men and Fire; another a short history of wildland fires-seem to be afterthoughts. (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Portraits of great wildfires from ex-Chicago Tribune reporter Maclean (Fire on the Mountain, 1999). The 1953 Rattlesnake fire in northern California was the result of arson, which gives the author a chance to explore the motives of the arsonist (in this case banal, more the province of an anger-management specialist than a smokejumper) as well as the physiography of the fire: how it raced downhill, trumping the wisdom of firefighting lore, the willful winds resulting in a terrible blowup, "a swift, thunderous event engulfing everything in its path in a tidal wave of white-hot fire." Maclean’s phrasing seems unnecessarily overwrought compared with the simple fact that 15 firefighters died as a consequence of the fire's erratic behavior; also uncomfortably mismatched are the bullying tactics of the arson investigators and the instability of the man accused of igniting the fire. The author depicts the emotional undertow of death, along with the inexorability of a fire gone wild: "When water hit the flames, puffs of white smoke shot upward. Then a new spot fire would sparkle into being a few yards away." The second blaze, which erupted in 1999 in northern Nevada, demonstrates the dangers of not immediately jumping on a fire when suppression is the tactic of choice, a topic that segues neatly into chapters on the evolution of firefighting policy in the Forest Service. In addition, Maclean notes the folly of hubris in the face of wildfire, the administrative snafus that can result in entrapment of firefighters, the pure miracle of escape ("The nugget of flame churned at the mouth of the gulch, then unexpectedly sped away"), even the value of a personal prayer. "Mommy, help me! I'm burning!" wasthe radio call of one fighter. She lived, happy to face down the jibes. Sharp descriptive analyses capture this atavistic force that charges across the human imagination in phenomenal and dreadful fashion. (21 b&w illustrations, not seen; 2 maps) Author tour. Film rights to LMNO and A&E, by Bill Contardi/William Morris on behalf of Jennifer Lyons/Writers House
