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.
Reviews-
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March 15, 2023
A Vancouver-based writer recounts "the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history." Located at the edge of Canada's boreal forest in northern Alberta, Fort McMurray--"Fort McMoney" to the locals--is the epicenter of the oil sands operations. Vaillant, the author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce, calls it a place of "outsized dimensions," where the largest bison on the continent roam and oil-field workers cultivate monstrous dependencies on cocaine. One of the most outsize of the phenomena is fire, which has a natural ecological role in maintaining the health of the forest but, in a time of a warming climate and ever encroaching human settlement, can become cataclysmic. So it was in May 2016, when a wall of fire sprung up and swallowed much of Fort McMurray. The fire was not extinguished until August of the following year, and it generated lightning storms and hurricane winds of such force that they spawned fires many miles away. It also cost nearly $10 billion in damages. "When it burns," writes Vaillant of the vast boreal biome, which stores as much carbon dioxide as the world's tropical forests combined, "it goes off like a carbon bomb." As his narrative makes abundantly clear, there is very little that anyone can do to stop this degenerative process, short of retreating for a couple of millennia during which humans don't burn fossil fuels. Given that unlikelihood, the Fort McMurray fire, already "a cruel teacher," will have plenty of kin to teach further lessons. There's a lot of good Elizabeth Kolbert-level popular science writing here along with grittier portraits of the lives of the people who make their living among the tar sands and scrub. Vaillant, whose previous books have centered on the intersections of human and natural realms and their often tragic consequences, asks interesting questions as well, perhaps the one most worthy of pondering being a deceptively simple one: "Is fire alive?" A timely, well-written work of climate change reportage.COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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April 3, 2023
Journalist Vaillant (The Tiger) offers a gripping account of the May 2016 fire that engulfed the city of Fort McMurray in the Canadian province of Alberta, destroying thousands of homes and forcing the evacuation of 88,000 people. His vivid description of the conflagration, which ignited during freakishly hot and dry weather and swept into town so suddenly that residents barely escaped in their cars as their houses flared and vaporized, is set against the Dantean backdrop of Fort McMurray’s oil-sands mining industry, one of the dirtiest outposts of the fossil fuels sector. Later chapters recap the science showing that greenhouse emissions to which the oil sands contribute are making droughts, heat waves, and wildfires more common. Vaillant’s sprawling narrative also takes in 19th-century sea otter hunts and the musings of 12th-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen, as he turns the Fort McMurray wildfire into a potent warning against the dangers of climate complacency and “unregulated free market capitalism.” Despite some moments of overwriting, Vaillant’s exploration of this material is rich and illuminating, and his prose punchy and cinematic. (“He thought he’d been hit, and he had—not by another vehicle, but by a fleeing deer, its fur smoking and aglow with embers.”) The result is an engrossing disaster tale with a potent message. Photos. Agent: Stuart Krichevsky, Stuart Krichevsky Literary. -
May 15, 2023
Fire is the most versatile and whimsical of disasters,"" Vaillant writes in his searing coverage of the wallop of wildfires, dominance of petroleum, blunders of Big Oil, and cataclysmic consequences of climate change. He investigates the genesis, spread, and damage of the massive 2016 Fort McMurray Fire in Alberta, Canada, capturing the catastrophe in apocalyptic prose: ""a suddenly annihilating world where fists of heat pounded on the windows, the sky rained fire, and the air came alive in roaring flame."" Vaillant's exploration of fire draws on physics and chemistry, philosophy and symbolism. He muses about the possibility that fire is ""alive."" It grows, breathes, moves, and can be extinguished. He notes that a fire's origin is often humble, while its future hinges on fuel, oxygen, heat, wind, and weather. People are dependent on fire and the energy it provides. For humans, fire is both a ""begrudging servant"" and a savage agent of destruction. Vaillant concedes that we've made Earth a fire planet. His robust and vivid writing, detailed reporting, and urgent concern for the environment make for sizzling reading.COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
