Young Men and Fire | 
| Author: Norman Maclean
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  78 reviews
Sales Rank: 29284
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 316
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0226500624
Dewey Decimal Number: 634.96180978664
EAN: 9780226500621
ASIN: 0226500624
Publication Date: November 15, 1993
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Amazon.com
On August 5, 1949, lightning came crashing down in the vast spruce forest above Seeley Lake, Montana, and touched off a roaring blaze. As every Westerner knows, lightning means fire, but the fire that raged through Mann Gulch that day was huge--the sort that occurs only every few decades. A battery of paratrooper-firefighters, many of them fresh veterans of World War II, had been anticipating it, and even looking forward to the chance to fight a great fire. Before the day ended thirteen of those smokejumpers lay dead, their charred remains evidence that something had gone terribly wrong. Norman Maclean gives a thorough account of the incident in language not meant for the squeamish: "Burning to death on a mountainside is dying at least three times ... first, considerably ahead of the fire, you reach the verge of death in your boots and your legs; next, as you fail, you sink back in the region of strange gases and red and blue darts where there is no oxygen and here you die in your lungs; then you sink in prayer into the main fire that consumes." After August 1949, he notes, the Forest Service came to recognize that not all fires need to be fought and that fire benefits most forest ecosystems.
Product Description
On August 5, 1949, a crew of fifteen of the United States Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for forty years, Norman Maclean puts back together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy.
Young Men and Fire won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.
"A magnificent drama of writing, a tragedy that pays tribute to the dead and offers rescue to the living.... Maclean's search for the truth, which becomes an exploration of his own mortality, is more compelling even than his journey into the heart of the fire. His description of the conflagration terrifies, but it is his battle with words, his effort to turn the story of the 13 men into tragedy that makes this book a classic."—from New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, Best Books of 1992
"A treasure: part detective story, part western, part tragedy, part elegy and wholly eloquent ghost story in which the dead and the living join ranks cheerfully, if sometimes eerily, in a search for truth and the rest it brings."—Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune
"An astonishing book. In compelling language, both homely and elegant, Young Men and Fire miraculously combines a fascinating primer on fires and firefighting, a powerful, breathtakingly real reconstruction of a tragedy, and a meditation on writing, grief and human character.... Maclean's last book will stir your heart and haunt your memory."—Timothy Foote, USA Today
"Beautiful.... A dark American idyll of which the language can be proud."—Robert M. Adams, The New York Review of Books
"Young Men and Fire is redolent of Melville. Just as the reader of Moby Dick comes to comprehend the monstrous entirety of the great white whale, so the reader of Young Men and Fire goes into the heart of the great red fire and comes out thoroughly informed. Don't hesitate to take the plunge."—Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post Book World
"Young Men and Fire is a somber and poetic retelling of a tragic event. It is the pinnacle of smokejumping literature and a classic work of 20th-century nonfiction."—John Holkeboer, The Wall Street Journal
"Maclean is always with the brave young dead. . . . They could not have found a storyteller with a better claim to represent their honor. . . . A great book."—James R. Kincaid, New York Times Book Review
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| Customer Reviews: Read 73 more reviews...
 A great story August 28, 2008
I loved this book. The detail and analysis resulted from decades of research and Maclean is a terrific writer. I love the piece-by-piece, methodical dissection of the story. I find this method of story telling and anaylsis similar to John Krakauer's "Into the Wild". I would like to see more maps and photos, but those that are included in the book are sufficient by most measures.
A Must Have July 25, 2008
This is the quintessential non-fiction account of Mann Gulch. It creates the foundation of our study of wild fire behavior. I could not turn the pages fast enough. Many quotable descriptions and observations about the firefighting industry is timelessly captured in this book.
Young Men and Fire July 13, 2008
This is a book written about a fire that took place in Montana back in the 1940's during which a group of smoke jumpers lost their lives. It is so well written that I found it difficult to put down. This was the beginning of the study of "fire", and all it's elements, as a science. Fascinating. This particular book is being used as required reading in our local "California Department of Fire" CDF. I read it as an adjunct to the Search and Rescue Team to which I belong. I recommend this to anyone, especially those living in a possible fire danger area.
Great book February 8, 2008
Any book that I spend a great deal of time checking maps and names, to see who survived, has hooked me. This did. The horror has caused much thought. Check out the song "Cold Missouri Water"
One of the best books I ever read February 1, 2008
In 1949, sixteen "smokejumpers" were dropped in the remote Gates of the Mountains wilderness in Montana to fight what seemed to be a routine wildfire. Within an hour 13 of them were dead, consumed in a horrific conflagration. MacLean, a college professor and former firefighter himself, became obsessed with the case, and when he retired he spent every summer investigating the tragedy and piecing together what really happened that day in Mann Gulch.
MacLean says that the job of a storyteller is to transform catastrophe into tragedy -- to analyze the series of small screw-ups that lead to disaster and make sense of them. As you go on this journey into the fire with MacLean, you really can't wait to see what he learns next. And when he brings the survivors back to Mann Gulch, he and they discover the limits of what can really be learned and understood in the face of the implacable forces of nature.
MacLean never finished the book. When he died at age 87, his kids recognized the book's quality and had it edited and published. There are some overly literary metaphors from the pen of this former English professor that he might have left out if he had had the chance to look over his own work. This is a really petty matter in the face of the book's overall quality.
In the hands of an ordinary writer and thinker, you might say "Good if you want to know about firefighters," or disasters, or Montana. But this book is so thoughtful about the realities of man as part of nature that it transcends the Mann Gulch tragedy and becomes much more. I'd recommend it to any person of intelligence.
Reviewer: Liz Clare, co-author of "To the Ends of the Earth: The Last Journey of Lewis & Clark"
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