The Big Burn

Author: Timothy Egan
Genre: Non-fiction
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010
Pages: 324
Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men—college boys, day workers, immigrants from mining camps—to fight the fire. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them.

 Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force. Equally dramatic is the larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by and preserved for every citizen.

Review: Here I go, back into the world of Muir, Pinchot, W. A. Clark, and Roosevelt. It's a fascinating cast of characters centered around preservation and a devastating forest fire. I've read a lot about these men this year, as well as the topic at hand. Every book sheds a little more light on the time and place, as well as the events.

Furthermore, this book was written by Timothy Egan, who also wrote The Worst Hard Time, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Egan takes some time to set up "The Big Burn," too long if I'm being honest and the unlike the fire itself it quickly dies out. This just wasn't the page turner that The Worst Hard Time was. Maybe I've read too many books now about forest fires.