4.0
Fire Weather
By John VaillantPublisher Description
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION • A stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind from the award-winning, best-selling author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce • Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, TIME, NPR, Slate, and Smithsonian
“Grips like a philosophical thriller, warns like a beacon, and shocks to the core." —Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland
“Riveting, spellbinding, astounding on every page.” —David Wallace-Wells, #1 bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth
In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.
Fire has been a partner in our evolution for hundreds of millennia, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.
With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, TIME, NPR, Slate, and Smithsonian
“Grips like a philosophical thriller, warns like a beacon, and shocks to the core." —Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland
“Riveting, spellbinding, astounding on every page.” —David Wallace-Wells, #1 bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth
In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.
Fire has been a partner in our evolution for hundreds of millennia, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.
With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities39 Reviews
4.0
Havana
Created 22 days agoShare
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TamiD
Created 22 days agoShare
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Believable charactersDescriptive writingRealistic settingThought-provoking
John DiConsiglio
Created about 1 month agoShare
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“If a book doesn’t connect with me, I blame the writer—not the reader. But it’s hard to fault journalist Vaillant’s flame-by-flame account of the apocalyptic 2016 wildfire that consumed an Alberta outpost. It’s a meticulously reported climate cautionary tale—&, for me, a homeworky chore. The boreal forest-neighboring Fort McMurray revolved around mining tar-like bitumen for oil industries. When record temps soared, it became “as conducive to fire as is possible anywhere on Earth.” The blaze is the main character, more than the firefighters, oil workers or environmental scientists. But can a CO2-stoked “fire tornado” carry a whole book?”
Avalon
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Emily Clever
Created 3 months agoShare
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“"Every step we take may break a fall, but every breath we take staves off imminent death. With this barely conscious rhythm of self-resuscitation, we save our lives about 20,000 times a day. Consider the effects of an unplanned blockage to your airway: in the first 45 seconds of stifled breath, you will lose your manners, your language, your loyalties, your love, and with them, 10 million years of evolution, winding up wide-eyed and flailing somewhere lower than an ape. In the next 45 seconds, your evolutionary clock will spin back even faster, perhaps 200 million years, until you resemble a lizard, a savage soulless vehicle for raw impulse, focused with all your being on one immediate and crushing need. And in your final seconds, with your lungs ablaze and not a thought left in your head, you might be reduced to something even more basic, something a lot like fire: an appetite for oxygen--the animating gas--with nothing left of yourself, or even your life, but a chemical reaction, dying to happen. Breathing, a biochemical analog to hope, which is just a human expression for oxidizing, is our single most critical interaction with the outside world, the first and final thing we do."”
About John Vaillant
JOHN VAILLANT’s acclaimed, award-winning nonfiction books, The Golden Spruce and The Tiger, were national best sellers. His debut novel, The Jaguar’s Children, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. Vaillant has received the Governor General’s Literary Award, British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and the Pearson Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. He has written for, among others, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Guardian. He lives in Vancouver.
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