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Review: Young Men and Fire

About.com Rating 3.5 Star Rating
User Rating 3 Star Rating (1 Review) write a review

By , About.com Guide

Review: Young Men and Fire

The Bottom Line

The catastrophe at Mann Gulch could not have been told by a more qualified investigator. Norman Maclean not only worked for the U.S. Forest Service at one point in his early career but went on to become a scholar of Shakespeare and the William Rainey Harper Professor of English at the University of Chicago.
The 1949 fire was the worst disaster ever for smokejumpers. Norman Maclean defines his generation's ultimate wildfire disaster as his son John would go on to do in "Fire on the Mountain".
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Pros

  • Brief but excellent discourse on the danger and history of smokejumping.
  • Norman Maclean's prose turns the Mann Gulch event into a work of art.
  • A primer on firefighting mixed with good old storytelling.

Cons

  • Norman Maclean's death left an unprepared manuscript which had to be edited for publication.

Description

  • Great investigative journalism chronicled by a true wordsmith who actually saw the fire burning.
  • One of the best discriptions of a wildfire "blowup" with trapped men ever written.
  • Father of John N. Maclean who wrote "Fire on the Mountain".

Guide Review - Review: Young Men and Fire

This book takes the reader to that tragic moment in time where 13 young firefighters lost a race for life. Maclean dissects and reconstructs the event as no one else could. Maclean spends the last 14 years of his life obsessed with rooting out the truth behind the disaster.
Maclean also wrote the acclaimed book "A River Runs Through It".

Excerpt: "after the bodies had fallen, most of them had risen again, taken a few steps, and fallen again, this time like pilgrims in prayer, facing the top of the hill...The evidence, then, is that at the very end beyond thought and beyond fear and beyond even self-compassion and divine bewilderment there remains some firm intention to continue doing forever and ever what we last hoped to do on earth. By this final act they had come about as close as body and spirit can to establishing a unity of themselves with earth, fire, and perhaps the sky."
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User Reviews

 3 out of 5
Elegy Bordering on Obsession, Member dr_mabeuse

Fire, catastrophe, and tragic death always make for compelling reading, and Norman Maclean was uniquely suited to recount the story of the August, 1951 Mann Gulch wildfire in Montana in which 12 out of 15 elite Smokejumpers perished in the flames they were sent to control. Maclean grew up in the area, was a forestry worker and fire-fighter himself and avid woodsman, and moreover, was a master of an elegant and elegiac prose style capable of looking deep beneath the surface of the stories he told to reveal the deep connections between ourselves and the natural world we live in. Certainly his gifts are on display here, especially in the first part of the book in which he tells the actual story of happened at Mann Gulch, but Maclean is not satisfied with just telling the story; he seems obsessed with it, and the other two parts of the book are accounts of his research into the fire, his interviews with the survivors, and his own repeated returns to Mann Gulch to take measurements and try to pinpoint just where each man died and exactly where key events occurred, down to an accuracy of a few tens of yards. Really-- it was a tragedy, and the main points are known. If there's a lesson to be learned or a moral to the story, it's obvious in part 1. What's to be gained by knowing whether a man was 75 yards rather than 100 yards from safety? MacLean ends up fussing over minutiae while the story itself recedes into the background, and the book finally becomes as wearying as the author's exhaustive fieldwork and insistent arguments.

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