The Big Burn (Hardcover) ~ Timothy Egan (Author) Cover Art

The Big Burn (Hardcover)

By: Timothy Egan (Author)

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Review

"It's hard to write about fire, which is such a dynamic, swirling, chaotic force. It's hard also to write about politics....The task of the storyteller is to find a pace and rhythm that can address the two processes and show how they come together, and long before book's end, Egan does.....After the fire, the synthesis is as fine a piece of American history as I've read since Richard Manning's REWILDING THE WEST."

"Mr. Egan...has an evident skill for capturing the drama of natural disasters. THE BIG BURN is at its best when he moves through the hallmarks of catastrophe: the ignored warnings; the hesitation and the help sent too late; the final accounting."

"Using eyewitness accounts and official documents, Egan reconstructs the fire in horrific, exhausting detail....The fire scenes occupy the bulk of the narrative, but the backstory is more interesting, centered on the curious friendship between Roosevelt and Pinchot that helped give birth to the modern conservation movement....A longtime Pacific Northwest correspondent for the New York Times..., Egan always writes insightfully about his native region; here he commands the full sweep of characters, from the president on down to the loneliest mining-town drunk."

"[A] tremendous tale....Egan brings a touching humanity to this story of valor and cowardice in the face of a national catastrophe..." (starred review)

"Egan dissects the nation's worst-ever forest fire and its aftermath....Essential for any Green bookshelf." (starred review)

Publisher's note

Offers a dramatic account of the largest-ever forest fire in America, which cemented Teddy Roosevelt's legacy because the heroism shown by the forest rangers turned public opinion permanently in favor of the forests, which Roosevelt wanted to conserve, in a book by a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner. 75,000 first printing.

Annotation

Timothy Egan, who won the National Book Award for his last book, THE WORST HARD TIME, documents the worst forest fire in American history and details how a legacy of conservation arose from the ashes. The U.S. Forest Service was founded in 1905 by President Teddy Roosevelt and his friend and chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, but five years later, the fledgling operation seemed destined for extinction. Neither Congress nor Roosevelt's successor, William Howard Taft, supported the organization, which had proved to be a thorn in the paw of industrialists who craved more land and timber. On August 20, 1910, Pinchot and his ragtag bunch of rangers were confronted with catastrophe when several small forest fires in Washington, Idaho, and Montana were blown together into a massive inferno, which eventually consumed 3 million acres, including five entire towns, and killed more than 80 people. Egan portrays the hellish battle in terrifying detail, capturing the heroic efforts of the volunteer firefighters, and analyzes how the tragic fire ignited the attention of millions of Americas to the desperate need to preserve our natural resources.

In THE WORST HARD TIME, Timothy Egan put the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl at the center of a rich history, told through characters he brought to indelible life. Now he performs the same alchemy with the Big Burn, the largest-ever forest fire in America and the tragedy that cemented Teddy Roosevelt's legacy in the land.

On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and timber in an eyeblink. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men -- college boys, day-workers, immigrants from mining camps -- to fight the fires. 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, through the eyes of the people who lived it. Equally dramatic, though, 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 every citizen. The robber barons fought him and the rangers charged with protecting the reserves, but even as TR's national forests were smoldering they were saved: The heroism shown by those same rangers turned public opinion permanently in favor of the forests, though it changed the mission of the forest service with consequences felt inthe fires of today.


THE BIG BURN tells an epic story, paints a moving portrait of the people who lived it, and offers a critical cautionary tale for our time.

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