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Biography & Autobiography. History. Nature. Nonfiction. On August 5, 1949, a crew of fifteen of the U.S. Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in Montana wilderness. Less than an hour later, all but three were dead or fatally burned in a "blowup," an explosive 2,000 degree firestorm 300 feet deep and 200 feet tall. Winner of a 1992 National Book Critic Award, Young Men & Fire consumed fourteen years of Norman Maclean's life. He sifted through grief and controversy in search of the truth about the Mann Gulch tragedy, then wrote about it in excruciating detail. The sobering story of the worst disaster in the history of the Forest Service also embraces the themes of honor, death, compassion, rebirth, and the human spirit.… (more)
User reviews
With his forestry background, the author combined knowledge and ability to write beautifully to create a disaster book masterpiece. He excelled, especially, at telling the story of the fire and also telling the "what changed as a result." The lengthy middle section of the book--his attempt to track down information--seemed unfinished. This is not surprising because his search for answers and his writing were ongoing at the time of his death, before this book was completed.
Memorable writing. For instance, from the final portion: "From the elevation of retrospect we can see it all coming together more clearly and sooner than those who were there and running. For us the signs are many that in minutes the blowup would bring a total convergence of sky, young men, and fire, and after that, the dark; on the top of the hill, though there are only occasional partings in the smoke, the flames themselves were blinding and those inside the flames and smoke could no longer see what was happening to them and would happen next."
I loved, too, how the author managed to suggest what the dying Smoke Jumpers may have felt. He does so in a beautiful, reassuring way.
Due to the fact that the foreman built an escape fire at the last minute, something that hadn't been done before, this fire remains controversial, a mystery. Did the escape fire contribute to the deaths of some of the Smoke Jumpers or could it have saved them? Perhaps if the author could've finished it before he'd died, we might have a better answer.
This is a truly fascinating book, in need of some polishing, but unforgettable nonetheless. Very highly recommended!!
The book is a tribute to a group of young daredevils. One had survived the cold hell of Bastogne to die by fire. Another had braved the seas of WWII to perish in the mountains. At the fringe of civilization, together with the local drunks and never-do-wells, they were sent to battle nature. Nature both splendid and terrible, forceful and dangerous.
This book is both a report of the disaster and an analysis of its group and leadership processes. It served as the basis for Karl E. Weick's must read paper). McLean resolves puzzle by puzzle to reconstruct the last minutes of their lives in painstaking detail.
This book is also an old man's obsessive search for truth. McLean was 47 years old when the tragedy happened. He was 74 when he started working on this book. He tracked down archival information, interviewed and pestered witnesses and relatives. The US Forest Service both learned from the tragedy (and prevented a reoccurence by changing its training methods) and covered up its mistakes by influencing witnesses, altering their testimonies and tampering with evidence. McLean with all the time of a lonely retiree tracks down every path, climbs Mann Gulch multiple times (together with two survivors). The book becomes his life's work and purpose. Although, for all practical purposes he has uncovered everything, there is to know about the disaster, he soldiers on, investigates, questions himself, chasing the white whale. Young men and fire is also a portrait of an old man, clinging on to life, wanting to know, knowing that soon all his knowledge will disappear forever.
Highly recommended. A must read for everybody interested in small-unit interactions and decision-making processes.
I looked up Mann Gulch on Google Maps and incredibly there is a wildfire occurring when the picture was taken from space. I don't know if Google did this on purpose, or sheer "luck", but it adds to the books atmosphere to see the valley in the middle of an actual fire.
Young Men and Fire was an intensive research-laden book about a fire that had killed more than a dozen young smokejumpers nearly five decades before the book was published. Yet, it's still riveting. In reality, it's not just about the tragedy, but it's about a bit of mystery and potential cover-ups and remembering and forgetting and the obsession of one man (Maclean) to deliver a story he wants the world to know about as somewhat of a tribute to the young men who lost their lives. As for "dying too young," Maclean actually died before the book was completed and so it does seem to lose some of his voice towards the end - he started to publish late in life and it still strikes me that the world lost a great talent almost before it was recognized.
Back to the book - for the first 250 pages, Maclean's master-storyteller talents are displayed in full. However, the book doesn't hold up as well as the last 50 pages come up. It's too science-heavy and seems to lack Maclean's voice. I could believe he actually wrote what's on those pages, but I feel like he was only assembling his thoughts and had he more time, would have crafted even the science into something poetic (the reader will encounter examples of this earlier in the book).
So, by the time of his death Maclean had a book about water and a book about fire. Given more time, one has to wonder if the other classical elements of air and earth would have emerged in literary form from this amazing storyteller.
Maclean's writing in this book is minimal and clean, yet it imparts the men's youth and/or experience, their courage, the speed and inevitability of the force of nature they opposed, and the terribly tragic outcome.
The book drags in a few parts, but overall it’s a fascinating look at the horrible event. It’s as much
The book looses its focus in the second half, drifting a bit into personal feelings rather than facts. Overall, I’d say if the topic interests you read it, otherwise, skip it.
Side Note: The narrator of the audiobook was awful and I almost stopped reading it because of him. I learned later that it was read by Norman’s son, John Maclean, which explains a lot. It’s very rare to find an author or any other unprofessional reader that can do a good job with an audiobook. There are exceptions, like David Sedaris and Neil Gaiman, who are wonderful, but on average it doesn’t work out well.
"Yet we should also go on wondering if there is not some shape, form, design as of artistry in this universe we are entering that is composed of catastrophes and missing parts. Whether we are coming up or down the Gates of the Mountains, catastrophes everywhere enfold us as they do the river, and catastrophes may seem to be only the visible remains of defunct happenings of millions of years ago and the Rocky Mountains only the disintegrated explosions that darkened skies also millions of years ago and left behind the world dusted with gritty silicone. At least I should recognize this as much the same stuff as the little pieces of glass which in 1980 Mount St. Helens in Washington sprinkled over my cabin in Montana six hundred miles away, and anyone coming down the Gates of the Mountains can see that the laminations of ocean beds compressed in the cliffs on one side of the river match the laminations on the opposite cliffs, and, looking up, can see that an arch, now disappeared into sky, originally join both cliffs. There are also missing parts to the story of the lonely crosses ahead of us, almost invisible in deep grass near the top of a mountain. What if, by searching the earth and even the sky for these missing parts, we should find enough of them to see catastrophe change into the shape of remembered tragedy? Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts---hopefully, even the arch to the sky." (pp 46-47)
I especially liked the last section where they discussed the scientific / mathematical theories of fire. Yes I'm a sad geek.
A solid 4.8. Like others half stars would be handy a 4.5 would be a good choice for this.
(12 Days gift)