Book description
'I've watched deer and elk frolic in the meadow below me, and pine
trees explode in a blue ball of smoke. If there's a better job
anywhere on the planet, I'd like to know what it is.’
For nearly a decade, Philip Connors has spent half of each year in a
small room at the top of a tower, on top of a mountain, alone in
millions of acres of remote American wilderness. His job: to look for
wildfires.
Capturing the wonder and grandeur of this most unusual job and place,
Fire Season
evokes both the eerie pleasure of solitude and the majesty, might and
beauty of untamed fire at its wildest. Connors’ time up on the peak is
filled with drama - there are fires large and small; spectacular
midnight lightning storms and silent mornings awakening above the
clouds; surprise encounters with smokejumpers, black bears, and an
abandoned, dying fawn. Filled with Connors’ heartfelt reflections on our
place in the wild, Fire Season is an instant modern classic: a
remarkable memoir that is at once an homage to the beauty of nature, the
blessings of solitude, and the freedom of the independent spirit.
Advance praise for Fire Season:
‘A masterwork of close observation, deep reflection, and hard-won
wisdom . . . an unforgettable reckoning with the American land’ Philip
Gourevitch
‘His adventures in radical solitude make for profoundly absorbing,
restorative reading’ Walter Kirn Philip Connors has worked as a
bartender, a baker, a house painter, a janitor, and an editor at the
Wall Street Journal
. His essays have appeared in Harper’s
, the Paris Review,
the Dublin Review
and the London Review of Books
. He lives in New Mexico with his wife and their dog.
