The Big Burn is a non-fiction account of the largest wildfire in US history. It occurred in 1910 in northern Idaho and Montana, just a few years after the founding of the Forest Service, and it destroyed a huge swath of the newly protected forests. Egan describes the fire and the efforts to contain it, and also puts the event in the historical context of the conversation movement started by Teddy Roosevelt. The hyperbolic subtitle of the book is "Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America."
The story has its share of adventure and heroism, but I think Egan oversells the importance of the fire in "saving" America. (What he means is that the fire came at a politically difficult point for the Forest Service and may have saved its existence.) More generally, Egan is a good prose writer but not an organized one. I often felt like he lost the narrative line of the incident he's describing (cf. page 126). His characters are either all good or all bad.
No comments:
Post a Comment