Philip Conners, Fire Season ***

Fire Season is a short memoir of a summer Conners spent as a fire lookout in southern New Mexico. As usual with such books, it combines lyrical paeans to nature with scientific descriptions of fire behavior and historical interludes about government wilderness policy. Conners is especially interested in the issue of prescribed burns versus total suppression.

I appreciated the straightforwardness of Conner's prose -- not too many flights of fancy, even when describing sunset over the mountains. My favorite parts were the day-to-day details about the job:

We measure humidity with a nifty tool called a sling psychrometer. It holds two thermometers, side by side, in a metal casing on the end of a chain. One of the thermometers has a small sleeve over the bulb, which is dipped in water. Spun by the chain in the shade of a tree, the thermometers offer two different air temperatures, one wet, one dry.

He is less skilled at navigational descriptions. Despite many passages describing the orientation of his lookout tower, I never got a good sense of the layout of the wilderness area.