Currently reading
Hieroglyph: Stories and Blueprints for a Better Future
Ukraine: Zbig's Grand Chessboard & How the West Was Checkmated
The Girl on the Train: A Novel
Our Souls at Night: A novel
Above the Waterfall
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Designs on Film: A Century of Hollywood Art Direction
The Homicide Report: Understanding Murder in America
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
The Gods of Mars
Philip Connors tried his hand at a number of jobs and did pretty well. But his true love was the outdoors, particularly the remote outdoors. So, when an opportunity presented itself for him to spend half a year in a fire tower in remotest New Mexico, he dropped his reportorial gig at the Wall Street Journal and headed southwest. He knew a fair bit about the outdoors before beginning, from his Minnesota upbringing, and learned even more on the job. He kept on learning as he re-upped for one more season, then another and another, amassing a lifetime’s worth of insight, contemplation and appreciation. In addition to the poetry of his language when writing of the natural world, Connors takes on policy issues, looking, for example, into the effect of publicly subsidized cattle grazing on public land, and on the impact of years of uninformed fire suppression-at-all-costs. Some fire is good, indeed is essential for the well-being of some environments. Smokey the Bear need not apply.
Connors is a gifted story teller and peppers his narrative with welcome side-trips. For those of you who remember Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, there is a wonderful story here about Marlon Perkins. When Connors tells of retrieving Jack Kerouac’s unpublished fire-watcher logs from the New York Public Library, it is like opening Tut’s burial site for the first time. There are enough southwest characters here to fill a good sized bar, each with an attached tale.
Fire Season is a work of deep love. Connors brings a poetical sensibility to his descriptions of the natural world he experienced. To be unmoved by his nature prose is to be unmovable. He also offers information and insight into issues relevant not only to our national forests and national parks, but to our land as a whole. Hopefully, Fire Season will become one of the hottest books of 2011.