This collection of two long and two short essays on U.S. wildfire fighting displays the excellent reporting skills that made Maclean's first book, Fire on the Mountain, a dazzling and popular success. While his earlier book gained much of its storytelling strength from its focus on one incident, Colorado's South Canyon fire of 1994, Maclean's new work is less unified, held together not by a grand idea but primarily by the author's interest in aspects of fire; consequently, the book never becomes more than the sum of its parts. The longest section is a reconstruction of the 1953 rattlesnake fire in California's Mendocino National Forest, which killed 15 wildland firefighters. Maclean's dogged pursuit of reconstructing some key assumptions about the fire makes this a thriller in disguise. The highlight of the book is the second long piece on the 1999 Sadler fire in Nevada, which displays all the power of his earlier work through a highly charged and exciting account of a firefighting crew's disastrous encounter with an uncontrollable fire. Two smaller essays, however—one on the last survivor of the 1954 Mann Gulch fire, which Maclean's father, Norman, wrote about in Young Men and Fire; another a short history of wildland fires—seem to be afterthoughts. (June)
