At least four reviews of Timothy Egan’s book about the Big Blowup fires of 1910, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America appeared today or yesterday on various web sites. It seems like a strange coincidence for a book that came out a couple of weeks ago. Or maybe its because many book reviews appear in the Sunday editions of newspapers.

The International Association of Wildland Fire has scheduled a conference in Spokane, Washington October 25-29, 2010 that will in part commemorate the fires of the Big Blowup of 1910.

The author is going to appear in Seattle on Monday, October 19 at the Elliott Bay Book Company to discuss the book.

The Seattle Times has a review of the book HERE, Oregon Live has one HERE, and The Maui News review is HERE. The excerpt below is from a review by Time-News Magicvalley.com.

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On the evening of Saturday, Aug. 20, 1910, the Idaho Panhandle exploded.

Literally.

A cold wind out of the Palouse ignited a number of small fires burning in Idaho’s bone-dry Coeur d’Alene National Forest. Drawing energy from the flames themselves, the winds picked up speed until they reached 80 mph by the time they hit the town of Wallace.

In two days, 3 million acres of Idaho and Montana burned. That’s an area twice the size of the Great Salt Lake.

Eighty-seven people died, mostly the hard way: Pinned to the ground by fallen trees, they were still conscious while their hair burned and their skin curled up and blackened.

But it was an event that changed the course of American history – and Idaho’s, according to New York Times columnist Timothy Egan, whose book about the Great Fire of 1910, “Big Burn,” was published this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ($27). [$16.20 at Amazon.com]

Simply put, it saved the Forest Service, which nearly shriveled and died after President Theodore Roosevelt left office in 1909, and institutionalized professional management by government of public lands, Egan argues.

Idaho – 61 percent federally owned – looks as it does today because of the consequences of the Big Blowup.

“When the Rockefellers and the Weyerhaesers had pushed through these woods, it appeared that a new order was at hand,” Egan writes. “But it had not lasted.”

Heroic

Egan is a 54-year-old Seattle writer who has long covered the West for the Times. He’s best known for his 2005 book about the Dust Bowl, “The Worst Hard Time.”

But the tone of “Big Burn” is different. This is a story of heroes.

Two of them, especially. Gifford Pinchot, the son of a timber baron who devoted his life to saving trees, was a close friend of Roosevelt’s and the first chief of the Forest Service. Mostly through dogged persistence, he willed America into protecting vast tracks of its outback and kept government-managed conservation alive when the odds were against it.

Ed Pulaski was a former miner who hired on with the Forest Service as an assistant ranger in Wallace. During the Big Blowup he saved dozens of lives – at one point by pointing his revolver at panicked firefighters to keep them from running into the flames – while being maimed himself. After the fire, he spent he own meager resources caring for the injured.

Most of the handful of rangers working the Coeur d’Alene and Lolo national forests in 1910 were proteges of Pinchot and graduates of the Yale University School of Forestry, but not Pulaski. He mastered the forest by working in it and learning from it.

When the fire blew up, the Forest Service recruited every able-bodied man it could find, eventually 10,000 of them, even though it didn’t have the money to pay them. They – and the all-black 25th Infantry Regiment – saved lives, homes and, in some cases, entire communities.

Two books about wildfire have been published in the last couple of months. I have not had a chance to read either of them yet, but I’m looking forward to the opportunity.

These descriptions are from Amazon.com

No Grass, by Shawna Legarza

Wildland firefighters, especially “hotshots,” are a breed alone. It is a lifestyle many will never understand. They are dispatched throughout the Nation, always ready to work in the very worst kind of disaster. They sleep wherever it’s safe and often do not shower for weeks.

So why would a young woman, reared on a Nevada cattle ranch, give up the open spaces for a life of danger? This is only one of the questions answered with humor and insight in Shawna Legarza’s memoir, No Grass.

After working her way through college as a firefighter, the author was part of the World Trade Center Recovery Efforts, where she met her husband who, like Legarza, was a firefighter. When he took his own life, the author mustered a new brand of courage and formed a non-for profit program to help the many physically and emotionally wounded firefighters, too brave to ask for help. This is a passionately told story, filled with determination and hope.

[Shawna's husband was Marc Mullenix.]

Area Ignition, by Joseph Valencia

In August 1979, along a remote ridgeline near Santa Maria, four firefighters from a California Division of Forestry (CDF) engine crew, were preparing to defend the northern flank of the Spanish Ranch fire.

Captain Ed Marty, and firefighters; Scott Cox, Ron Lorant and Steve Manley responded to the fire from the Nipomo fire station. They were all from California, but were as different as the golden state’s angles, aspects and arenas. They were defined more from where they were from; Tehama, Goleta, Long Beach and La Habra.

No one predicted what would happen next—but in a page from man versus nature, the fire accelerated and then swept across the face of the slope which the four young firefighters were on.

At 4:25 PM their thin line of defense was cut-off and a retreating bulldozer operator was overrun. Minutes later, they tried to escape from the sweeping area ignition, but the fire cut-off their retreat and along with another dozer operator they were all overrun by fire.

The tragedy that occurred and the subsequent investigation would change the way the state fire agency operated on area wildfires. Area Ignition looks back 30-years to honor the men who fought and died in the Spanish Ranch Fire. It recreates the courage, emotion and human frailties that are interwoven from the initial ignition point—to the final survivors’ thoughts as they proceeded past a solitary CDF fire engine.

Although much has changed since then—young firefighters still go out every year to battle California wildfires just like their brothers of the past. We owe it to them to understand a little bit of the awesome power of wildfires and the people who fight them.

–

[Mr. Valencia is also the author of From Tranquillon Ridge, a book about the Honda Canyon fire on Vandenberg Air Force Base in 1977 on which three people were killed, including the base commander. Mr. Valencia worked as a firefighter on that fire.)

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To find out more about the books or to purchase them:

No Grass

Area Ignition

From Tranquillon Ridge

You may have heard of the Kindle, a very cool electronic reading device sold by Amazon.  Using a cell phone signal, it can download books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, and documents which can then be read on the device. Books can be downloaded in less than a minute–magazines and newspapers in even less time.

Wildfire Today is available on the Kindle beginning today–the first fire-related blog to be on the Kindle. You can subscribe to it through the device and have it automatically downloaded throughout the day as Wildfire Today is updated with new articles.

And, yes, you will have to pay for it.  The subscription is $1.99 a month for wireless delivery. But, you’re thinking, why should you pay for Wildfire Today when you can get it free on your computer?  Good point. I would have made it free on the Kindle, or at least would have set a very low fee, but those options were not available.  Amazon decided on the price. But if you are not near a computer, but have a Kindle and a cell phone signal, you can still keep up to date with what’s happening in the world of wildland fire.

It uses the Sprint cell phone network to download material. That worried me at first, since I don’t have dedicated Sprint service here in the boonies of South Dakota, but it works fine here anyway. Obviously Sprint has agreements, roaming I guess, with other cell phone carriers.  And it does not cost anything to download stuff, regardless of which carrier you are using.

Books cost around $9.99 each, and magazines and newspapers are around $0.49 to $1.50 each.  It is fascinating to be able to grab, within seconds, today’s copy of the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, or dozens of other newspapers.

I took a Kindle on two trips recently, including an extended vacation at a beach house in southern Mexico (BEFORE the swine flu scare, thankfully!).  Before the Kindle, I would have loaded my suitcase with a bunch of heavy books and magazines, but instead I put electronic copies of them on the Kindle.

The device weighs 10 ounces and is only 1/3 of an inch thick.  It’s very easy to use and there is room to store 1,500 books.

A couple of months ago Amazon.com, that sells the Kindle, came out with a redesigned model, the Kindle 2, which has some ergonomic enhancements and a 25% longer batter life than the original model. And just a couple of days ago they announced a new, larger version, the Kindle DX, which will be available this summer and has a 9.7″ screen, compared to the 6″ screen on the Kindle 2. I find the 6″ screen to be perfectly adequate, and the device can be easily packed and transported.

The devices are not particularly cheap, with the 6″ screen version selling for $359. The new 9″ one will be $489.

The battery life is great, lasting for several days before needing to be recharged, which can be done with a wall charger or a USB cable from a computer.  It uses a new technology, “e-ink”, that consumes no power while the image is being displayed on the screen.

Reading a book on the Kindle is a pleasant experience.  To turn a page, press a button near your thumb and in about a second or less there it is.  The screen has excellent contrast and is easy to read without any strain. It does not have color capability–that would have eaten up the battery much more quickly.

Reading a newspaper is not as enjoyable as browsing through a paper version. A table of contents is available–you can browse by sections and see the names of articles.  Then you click on an article to see and read it. Or, you can just click from one article to the next one, eventually browsing through the whole newspaper.  It is still easy to read the newspaper, but browsing electronically is a different experience than holding a paper version in your hand and glancing at the headlines.

You can also transfer documents, such as Microsoft Word documents, to the Kindle.  I put copies of my airline itinerary and passport on it.  I figured if I lost my passport, having an image of it on my Kindle would make getting a replacement a little easier.

The CalFire firefighter who rescued the “Lil’ Smokey” bear cub on the fire in northern California last summer is writing a book about the experience. The cub’s paws are almost healed and the rescue center expects to release him back into the wild this winter.

Here is a link to a 34-second news video about the book and the bear.

Becky Blankenship, after a couple of years on the Logan Hot Shots, collaborated with her sister Wendy to write a book of photographs and poetry about wildland fire. Here is an excerpt from an article in the Salt Lake Tribune about the book:

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Few professions beside firefighting offer lower pay in return for the highest risk of physical harm, but that never put a damper on Becky Blankenship’s enthusiasm. After working for two years on the U.S. Forest Service’s trail crew from afar, she jumped at the chance of getting her “red card” training certificate for firefighting.

Two “blow-ups” — sudden flare-ups of forest land — during a 2001 firefight in the Uinta Mountains might have scared off any other first-timer.

“I loved it,” Blankenship said.

So much so, in fact, that she began chronicling her experiences through photography.

The soot in your nostrils, bathing in creeks, endless diet of M&Ms and meals-ready-to-eat faded compared to the camaraderie. Walk into a restaurant of cheering patrons after long days of putting out a forest fire and even the multitude of aches in your body seems to melt.

Wendy Blankenship, Becky’s older sister and an MFA-educated poet, noticed that her sister’s life on the “hotshot” crew was not just a lifestyle, but often a separate language.

Sitting in the back seat as their mother drove around their Wellsville home near Logan, Wendy was struck by words Becky used. A “cat-face tree” was one burnt out, or burning, near the trunk. A “widow maker” was a burnt tree so precariously fragile the fall of a branch might kill. Most poetic of all was “along the black,” the burn-out safety zone fire fighters retreated into when things “got gunny” near a burning forest.

“I just saw it as another day of work. Wendy saw it as poetry,” Becky said.

What both sisters soon realized was that their complementary views– Becky’s photography and Wendy’s poetry — would make for a bracing book. The result, Along The Black , is a 46-page homage to the grit and courage of one of the world’s most dangerous professional callings.