Detailed item info | Synopsis | Norman MacLean scrupulously examines the tragic events of August 5, 1949, when lightning struck and started a forest fire in the Rocky Mountains. Thirteen young airborne firefighters were killed trying to extinguish it, when a 200-foot high firestorm erupted into a vast wall of death. MacLean, who had been both a forester and a firefighter in his youth, left the manuscript of this monumental work unfinished at his own death in 1990, at the age of 88; he had spent 14 years writing it.
| | Size | | Height: | 8.5 in. | | Width: | 5.5 in. | | Thickness: | 0.8 in. | | Weight: | 14.4 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | The NYT A River Runs Through It. In 1949, a crew of U.S. Forest Service Smokejumpers parachuted into a Montana forest fire. In less than an hour, all but three were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for 40 years, Maclean reconstructs the pieces print.
| | Industry reviews | "An extraordinary wise and lyrical narrative of wildfire and Smokejumpers; a haunting commentary on birth, sex, death, memory and rebirth; the memoir of 'heat and loneliness'."
Gretel Erlich
"A book that tears the heart, not only for the young men who died in Mann Gulch, but for the old man ...thirty years later...trying to keep himself upright long enough to get it all down."
Pete Dexter
"A remarkable and fascinating account of a remote disaster. MacLean's obsession with the Mann Gulch inferno is immediate and powerful; those white crosses on the slope are no more graphic than MacLean's reconstruction of the tragedy."
Evan S. Connell
"'Young Men and Fire' is at once poetic and high-minded, about rhythm and about writing. MacLean has given us, in his exemplary toughness, his scholarly care, his stylish and wry American skepticism, permanent words to life by."
Thomas McGuane
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