Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Young Men and Fire: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition

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"Young Men and Fire" is THE BEST book I've ever read.

Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2022

What else to say but that this is the BEST book I've ever read, and I've read a LOT of great, classic and wonderful books in my almost 70 years on this blue planet. I've read this amazing book multitudes of times over the past years, and I learn something new each time. This true story is brilliantly written with an eye to compassion and truth, a compilation of history, observation, research, investigation and critical thinking, with a soothing dose of respect and admiration not only for those 13 young Smokejumpers who lost their race with a wildfire in Mann Gulch on August 5, 1949, but also for others who were in some way deeply and personally touched by the tragic loss of life, those who were affected by this tragedy for the remainder of their days, whether a few years or a few decades. The prose used by the late, great Norman Maclean is wonderfully touching and deeply soulful, his words are like a massage to my heart and mind as I read them ... it's actually hard to properly describe. I knew almost nothing about Smokejumpers and little of the USFS before reading this book, but now I'm fascinated by the Mann Gulch tragedy in particular and by the courage and selflessness shown by Smokejumpers, and as well by the training of- and abilities shown by- those in the USFS involved with protecting our beautiful forests and wildlands from destruction by wildfires.

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John R. Meyers

you’re in for a flaming disappointment

Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2020

I suspect that MacLean had one awesome book in him—A River Runs Through It—and we’re blessed that he wrote it. But THIS book is an entirely different matter. It sucks. Painful, pointless, boring, self-absorbed. The occasional glimpses of life a couple of generations ago are delightful, but they are squished between long, agonizing, rattling passages of nonsense. I wanted to set myself on fire.

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Mark Zemke

"Young Men and Fire" is THE BEST book I've ever read.

Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2022

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Still crackles

Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2014

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Published 22 years ago, "Young Men & Fire" still crackles today. Norman MacLean's account of the Mann Gulch fire, which claimed the lives of 13 firefighters in 1949, is a powerful piece of narrative journalism. But MacLean warps the form--fearlessly. He practically instructs us how to react and think about the tragedy, yanking us up steep canyon walls to ponder the series of easily-made mistakes in the tragedy, where "young men died like squirrels."

The lightning-sparked fire was a "catastrophic collision of fire, clouds and winds" in Mann Gulch, located between Butte and Great Falls along the upper Missouri River. The fire was first spotted by a forest ranger and soon a C-47 was on the way with smokejumpers on board, heading to the remote canyon with winds so rough that one smokejumper got sick and did not jump. Fifteen smokejumpers parachuted into the fire and joined the forest ranger, who had been fighting the fire on his own for hours, on the ground. MacLean parses these first few decisions carefully and highlights the many ways in which it was unlikely this crew might succeed--their youth, lack of training and lack of training together. To make matters worse, their radio was destroyed during the jump (its parachute failed to open).

The tragedy unspools over a few fast hours, flames racing up the steep slopes of the canyon, feeding on knee-high cheatgrass. MacLean does an admirable job of breaking down the series of events, but it gets a bit complicated and hard to picture, no matter how many times MacLean takes us back to various vantage points to consider (and reconsider) how the flames won and the men lost.

The Mann Gulch fire is infamous for the tragedy but also noted for the "escape fire" lit by Wagner Dodge, who figured out in the high-pressure situation that the way to survive was to light his own fire and lay down in the smoking embers in order to hide, essentially, from the bigger onrushing blaze. Dodge urged others to join him, but they didn't heed his pleas--or didn't understand the strategy, given the panic. Dodge was one of three survivors. The controversy over this moment--could others have survived as well?--remains.

MacLean takes on the role of investigator, prosecutor and philosopher. "Young Men & Fire" is compelling reading precisely because MacLean asserts his point of view and takes us inside his thought process, neatly interweaving his personal take with events on the ground and almost insisting that we try and figure out what happened. "We enter now a different time zone, even a different world of time. Suddenly comes the world of slow-time that accompanies grief and moral bewilderment trying to understand the extinction of those whose love and everlasting presence were never questioned. Al there was to time were the fixty-six speeding minutes before the fire picked watches off dead bodies, blew them up a hillside ahead of the bodies, and froze the watch hands together. Ahead now is a world of no explosions no blowups, and, without a storyteller, not many explanations."

Where some writers of narrative non-fiction work hard to keep their distance from their subject, MacLean purposely weaves himself into the story, determined to come to terms with the tragedy in the same way he wrote the novel "A River Runs Through It" as a way to come to terms with the death of his brother.

In the end, MacLean doesn't have all the answers and views the Mann Gulch with a long view. The "truculent universe," he concludes, "prefers to retain the Mann Gulch fire as one of its secrets--left to itself, it fades away, an unsolved violent incident grieved over by the fewer and fewer still living who are old enough to grieve over fatalities of 1949."

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Wiredferret

A book about mortality and the young men who don't believe in it.

Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2012

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Norman MacLean inadvertently gave me one of my formative views on writing. I was in high school when "A River Runs Through It" came out. I don't remember much about it, fly-fishing not being my passion, but I remember a crusty newspaper editor saying to a young writer, "Good. Now half."

Good. Now half.

I carried that piece of wisdom around from that day on. So it seems interestingly circular that Young Men and Fire is really two books, and if halved, either could stand alone.

The first half is the story of the Mann Gulch fire: what the terrain is like, who the boys were, what smokejumping was like at that point. It includes a meticulous and heart-pounding timeline of how everything went so wrong, and the rescue efforts, such as they were. It is the classic disaster analysis narrative, but with some really beautiful prose, and a weird dreamlike recounting of MacLean's own firefighting experience.

As I was reading, I thought that I was glad I was not John MacLean, to try and cover the same ground his father had, but with less obvious mastery of the language. The elder man's writing is so sharp and vivid.
"Here the fire rocked back and forth like a broadjumper before it started toward the takeoff. Then it jumped. One by one, other like fires reached the line, rocked back and forth, and they all made it."

"The black poles looked as if they had been born of the gray ashes as the result of some vast effort at sexual intercourse on the edges of the afterlife."

"There's nothing wrong with romanticism, except that sometimes it isn't enough."

Alone, this would be a near-perfect book (he gets a little distracted by prose sometimes).

The second half of the book is also fascinating, in a less whizz-bang way. It is the story of MacLean teaching himself investigative journalism late in life, in pursuit of this one story. It's about an old man and his need to understand what happened.

He fights through both literal and metaphorical obstacles, trying to track the paper trail, the minimal amount of data that was collected, the way processes were changed.

"Also genetically they like shady secrets and genetically they like to protect shady secrets but have none of their own. I gather that government organizations nearly always have this unorganized minority of Keepers of Unkept Secrets, and one of these, I was told, went so far as to write a letter to be read at a meeting of the staff of the regional forester reporting that I was making suspicious visits to Mann Gulch and reportedly and suspiciously arranging to bring back with me to Mann Gulch the two survivors of the fire."

"Scholars of the woods know that one of the best bibliographical reference works to consult is the postmistress of a nearby logging town."

He also went back to Mann Gulch over and over, trying to pace out the locations of the bodies, the fires. Imagine this old man, clambering awkwardly up the steep slope in the hot summer sun, trying to think what it had been like.

Eventually he trails off into the realm of math and science, studying how fast a fire travels in different fuels, what effect slope has, what we can now figure out and reconstruct.

Overall, it's a very hopeful story, that we can learn enough to prevent the same thing from happening over and over again.

"I said to myself, "Now we know, now we know." I kept repeating this line until I recognized that, in the wide world anywhere, "Now we know, now we know" is one of its most beautiful poems."

Read if: You are looking for evocative, mannered prose. You love fire stories and investigative reporting. You are on some kind of wildfire book kick as I obviously am.

Skip if: You are an impatient reader, in search of a plot. You will be bothered by trying to find meaning in a disaster. Philosophical noodling will make you nuts.

Also read: All the President's Men for the story of reporting a story. The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America for information on what led to the nature of the Forest Service that MacLean is dealing with.

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J. Matthews

Young Men and Fire

Reviewed in the United States on August 27, 2012

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The story of the Mann Gulch fire is a story of adventurous young men and their collision with startling tragedy. It is a mystery story, an investigative story, a story of an older man trying to discovery and understand something from long ago, something deeply painful, something most people wanted to forget. It is a story of youth and courage, of the woods and woodsmen, of tragic loss and the suffering of loved ones.

Norman writes:

"Those who knew something about the woods or about nature should soon have perceived an alarming gap between the almost sole purpose, clear but narrow, of the early Smokejumpers and the reality they were sure to confront, reality almost anywhere having inherent in it the principle that little things suddenly and literally can become big as hell, the ordinary can suddenly become monstrous, and the upgulch breeze suddenly can turn to murder. Since this principle comes about as close to being universal as a principle can, you might have thought someone in the early history and training of the Smokejumpers would have realized that something like the Mann Gulch fire would happen before long. But no one seems to have sensed this first principle because of a second principle inherent in the nature of man--namely, that generally a first principle can't be seen until after it has been written up as a tragedy and becomes a second principle."

Staying at his family's lake cabin in Montana during the summer break, Norman was within twenty miles at the time of the fire. A woodsmen himself who almost was caught in the Fish Creek fire when working for the Forest Service as a young man, he always felt a connection to the events that happened on Mann Gulch that hot August day. Upon his retirement, he took upon himself the job of discovering the secrets known only to those that perished in the fire. He did so to honor those that died there, to discover and share with them in their lives, their suffering and their tragedy, and in so doing shed light upon tragedy itself, a thing which in one way or another will ultimately become a part of all of our lives.

Norman Maclean is a fine man to head into the woods with. He has a dry sense of humor that is never lost, even when he is suffering through the heat of Mann Gulch in August. Of the many men we meet in our journey, I loved the character of Robert Sallee. Tough young kid and a very straightforward man. He led a very productive life, and resides in retirement today in Spokane Washington. Another favorite is Wag Dodge, the foreman, who kept his cool in the hottest of pressures, and discovered a way out, if only they would follow him to it. The responsibility of keeping those men safe weighed heavy upon him. After the fire, he stayed two more days, helping to identify the lost firefighters and remove their bodies. Dodge could never bring himself to jump again. He went up three more times, but could not go out through the door and into the unknown. His was a particularly tragic story.

Norman Maclean never finished Young Men and Fire. Perhaps the journey of self discovery had not reached its end by the time of his death. Perhaps the threads he attempted to weave together could not quite fit. Perhaps he tired before the fire and its tragedy, and was himself overtaken by it all. In the end it was left for his son, John Maclean, to finish the project, which he did along with the help of a number of the editors from the University of Chicago Press.

"It is clear to me now that the universe in its truculence doesn't permit itself to be that well known."
- Norman Maclean

Norman's Young Men and Fire is much more than a story of a deadly forest fire. It is a story of life and tragedy. I am there with Norman heart and soul. He is a fine writer, and it was a pleasure to be able to travel along with him, though the answers we sought were elusive, and sometimes not for us to find.

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Mike

You get a feeling of what good could come out of a human tragedy

Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2018

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Everything you never knew about fire in the wild. The Mann Gulch fire was an eye opener for the fire sciences. You get a feeling of what good could come out of a human tragedy. You also get an understanding of what making the right decision under pressure and not achieving your greater goal can do to a human being. Wag Dodge died before people would appreciate his actions. Highly recommended for anyone that spends any amount of time in the out of doors.

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Matthew Jacobs

Emotionally and mentally gripping.

Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2009

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This book grabs you, by the heart as well as the mind. I found myself emotionally touched by the stories of those caught in the flames or narrowly escaping them. Maclean's words often connected with me at the gut level. I found myself flipping back to re-read certain sections for their impact. Nevertheless, this is no melodrama. Maclean does not resort to cheap sentimentality, as his words are often simple, but with an incredible depth of meaning that few authors can match.

Maclean sought to understand Mann Gulch and the tragedy, and his quest becomes the reader's. He communicates the depth of his own desire to understand what happened, particularly in those infamous few minutes that separated life from death for eleven men, though death was tragically slow for two more. People feared Maclean would die on the slopes of Mann Gulch, as a previous fire scientist, Harry Gisborne, had done while researching the area himself.

I highly recommend this book. It's a powerful story to begin with, but adding Maclean's talent makes it a must-read for everyone.

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Charles T. Bauer

A Stoic Meditation upon Young Death

Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2012

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Part detective story, part forensics analysis, part firefighters' handbook, part war story, and part deep reflection on an historic tragedy, once well known, but now sadly forgotten. This highly personal saga is the last work (1972, perhaps never given it's final polish) of Norman Maclean, author of the better known "A River Runs Through It." Poetic and bittersweet it tells the tale of seeking the facts, amid much confusion, ambiguity, and not a little government cover up, of a 1949 wildfire or "blowup" that took the lives of thirteen young smokejumpers in the Helena National Forest in west-central Montana, a remote, isolated, and inhospitable area subject to extremes of climate and terrain. Highly recommended for its imaginative and surprising approach, its stoic dignity employed to honor the courage of the youthful elite who walk daily, and often invisibly, among us, and for it's restrained approach to both the hero's panegyric and the humble personal eulogy.

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R. Brooks

Norman McLeans masterpiece

Reviewed in the United States on April 3, 2014

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This work was finished after he died and the topic involved was something he obviously grappled with. The death of men, the foreman busy as the fire blew down on them worrying about rounding himself up something to eat, the haphazard death of most of the crew, the foreman lighting a fire, then laying down on the ashes of that fire to survive the oncoming inferno, those who ran and managed by luck and just a wandering drive to excape over the ridge, the randomness of the wind that drove it down on them and the realization that they were a long way from home and people who cared about them had no inclination of their doom, all these pieces were what the author worked with to come up with a lonely compelling story. Smoke jumpers are always at risk and fast action isn't always the solution without knowledge of the situation.

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Mollie N. Benzominer

A tragic and wonderful story

Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2006

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This is a fine story of brave men in a tragic struggle. A struggle that they loose. The entire book covers the 16 minutes it took for these smoke jumpers to land, confront a "10'oclock" fire and die. Norman Maclean researches the human and scientific causes of this disaster. It was especially of intrest to me because when I went through the fire fighter academy here in Northern California, this was an incident that we studied. Norman Maclean writes in a sparcer prose than in "A River Runs Through It, and other stories" but it is no less facinating and we learn details about the authors life, that makes this story a personal one. He did not finish the book before his death and the last section was written with minimal editing from the original manuscript. This section is the most beautiful and moving of the entire book. I cannot recommend this book highly enouph.

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M. Hohmann

Great read about big wilderness wild fire

Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2013

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This is a classic adventure by Norman MacLean. The story of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire in western Montana. A terrible fire that caught rangers by surprise; the details of the follow-up investigation informs the reader of the technical aspects of fighting wild forest fires- big fires, and the uncertain winds that make them so dangerous and hard to contain; MacLean discusses fire fighting facts, research and theories; and this read may just help you survive if you are ever unlucky enough to find yourself in a big wild fire! --An excellent accompanying read is 'The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America' the story of a 1910 big wild fire in the Bitterroot Mountains of NE Idaho and W Montana by Timothy Egan.

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