Nature, Strategy & Weapons of War, Agricultural Sciences, Outdoor & Adventure Sports, Agricultural Sciences, Terrorism, Natural Disasters, World Politics, Diplomacy & International Relations

Fire

Name: Fire
Author: Sebastian Junger
ISBN: 9780060088613

by Sebastian Junger

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Overview

A riveting collection of literary journalism by the bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, capped off brilliantly by a new Afterword and a timely essay about war-torn Afghanistan — a superb eyewitness report about the Taliban's defeat in Kabul — new to book form.

Sebastian Junger has made a specialty of bringing to life the drama of nature and human nature. Few writers have been to so many disparate and desperate corners of the globe. Fewer still have met the standard of great journalism more consistently. None has provided more starkly memorable evocations of extreme events. From the murderous mechanics of the diamond trade in Sierra Leone, to an inferno forest fire burning out of control in the steep canyons of Idaho, to the forensics of genocide in Kosovo, this collection of Junger's reporting will take readers to places they need to know about but wouldn't dream of going on their own. In his company we travel to these places, pass through frightening checkpoints, actual and psychological, and come face-to-face with the truth.

Here is the same meticulous prose brought to bear on the inner workings of a terrifying elemental force; here is a cast of characters risking everything in an effort to bring that force under control.

Synopsis

Forest fires, terrorism, war: explorations of danger by the author of The Perfect Storm.

[M]agnificently conceived, lovingly written, perfectly evocative of a place, a time, a passion.

About the Author, Sebastian Junger

With his hair-raising and enthralling true adventure story, the blockbuster The Perfect Storm, renowned investigative journalist Sebastian Junger chronicled a story of heroism and tragedy wrought by a tropical storm while single-handedly reviving a new genre: the true-life disaster tale. His latest, A Death in Belmont, investigates his family's eerie connection to the Boston Strangler murders.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

Bestselling author Sebastian Junger brings his heart-pounding prose to bear on forest fires, terrorism, and war, in a collection of pieces that span a decade's worth of journalism. Junger's firsthand acounts of how people handle danger reveals both the awe and the terror evoked by desperate situations.

[M]agnificently conceived, lovingly written, perfectly evocative of a place, a time, a passion.

Maxim

[P]ropelled by dynamic reporting that reads as fluidly as great fiction.

Atlantic Monthly

[M]agnificently conceived, lovingly written, perfectly evocative of a place, a time, a passion.

From The Critics

What can be as big and dangerous as a cataclysmic storm? Why, a raging forest fire, of course. Fans of Junger's The Perfect Storm will no doubt be enthralled by the title story of his second book, a collection of magazine article whose subjects include whalers and military rebels. Urban firefighters are dramatic enough in their own right, but the firefighting crews Junger writes about are in a different realm altogether. They can be found parachuting into tinderbox forests and battling raging firestorms that have the explosive power of a nuclear detonation. Although Junger doesn't seem to be afflicted with the self-aggrandizing personality common to other adrenaline journalists like Anthony Loyd and Deborah Copaken Kogan, he is still drawn to the extreme edges of human experience. The best of these stories are marked with a generous humanity and sharpness of eye; in fact, the worst one could say is that they end too quickly.
—Chris Barsanti

Publishers Weekly

Danger junkies rejoice! The Perfect Storm king returns with no, not a new booklength narrative, but a collection of previously published magazine articles. Junger spent the last few years documenting some of the world's toughest places: Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and the former Yugoslavia, as well as nonmilitary hot spots like American wildfires. His reporting on wartime atrocities for Vanity Fair is well known, and his wilderness stories for adventure magazines like Outside and Men's Health have brought him an enormous extra-book readership. Junger's newest can be considered a sort of early Greatest Hits volume, wherein Junger's disaster-zone reporting will whet the appetites of risk voyeurs everywhere. Consider his interview with Afghan guerrilla leader Ahmad Shah Massoud ("After we'd spent half an hour ducking the shells, the commander said he'd just received word that Taliban troops were preparing to attack the position, and it might be better if we weren't around for it"), or his Kosovo klatch with Serbian paramilitaries ("The men grinned broadly at us. One of them wasn't holding a gun in his hands. He was holding a huge double-bladed ax."). But Junger is more than a dispassionate adventure-monger; he is an observer awed by the courage of "people confronting situations that could easily destroy them." Whether describing the trials of airborne forest firefighters or the occupational hazards of old-fashioned harpoon-and-rope whale hunting, Junger challenges readers to reconsider their fondness for ease: "Life in modern society is designed to eliminate as many unforeseen events as possible, and as inviting as that seems, it leaves us hopelessly underutilized. And that is where the ideaof `adventure' comes in." (Oct.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This is a collection of first-person reports by adventurer/reporter Junger that span the globe in his search for hot spots, from Sierra Leone to Afghanistan, from Kashmir to Kosovo. With reporting as timely as today's news, Junger (The Perfect Storm) moves from the first story, of a literal battle with fire by firefighters in the Western United States, which he narrates, to the more figurative but no less real "fire" of battlefields in wartorn areas of the world. The rest of the work is read by noted actor Kevin Conway, whose rugged voice is right for conveying the chaos of fire and war. A counterphobic's dream come true, and thrill seekers of both sexes will love the experience of listening to these "you are there"-style reports. Highly recommended. Mark Pumphrey, Polk Cty. P.L., Columbus, NC Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Run-for-cover writing from scary places, by Junger (A Perfect Storm), a man with an appetite for the ragged edge of life and the ability to write about it with restrained power. The ten pieces in this collection of magazine articles, one of which won a National Magazine Award for Reporting, have the authentic tang of dispatches from the front. Junger might be considered a bit of an adrenaline junkie because of the situations he puts himself into, but as for being in someone's gunsight: "there was nothing exciting about it, nothing even abstractly interesting. It was purely, exclusively bad." What comes across here is the writer's overpowering sense of awe at the events he describes. He writes with a pressure-cooker urgency, though with the lid firmly in place: no screeching high notes here, but the steady, awful thrum of things going out of control and death standing by. He tells of the intimations that smoke-jumpers feel when the woods they are in are about to explode into flame, and of the survival instincts followed by a man kidnapped with a group of trekkers by Kashmiri guerrillas who allow him alone to live. A good number of the pieces are situated in Kosovo, where the slaughter of Albanians by Serbians is without mercy or bounds. Most remarkable are Junger's accounts of such places where all moral referents are severely out of alignment, having only hours before shifted from everyday life and begun a whirling descent into madness. Sierra Leone is a good example: being shot by a diamond-smuggling, AK-47-toting, drug-crazed teenager is just a daily precaution one guards against, like typhus or dysentery. Deeply affecting stories of a ruthless world, natural and man-made, that will leave you stunned and distraught.