Here are 100 books that Fire Weather fans have personally recommended if you like
Fire Weather.
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I grew up reading stories of heroes, of adventures in fantastical worlds, and my time in the Marines expanded my sensibilities, adding grit and an understanding of real-world crises and conflicts. Give me compelling characters, unique worlds, and fast pacing, and I’ll be up until the wee hours glued to the page. Those are the kind of books I featured in this list, as well as what I try to write.
I read this to get an authentic perspective on wildland firefighting for my novel, but I got so much more out of it than that. The book interweaves the author’s firsthand account of his crew’s battles during a hellacious fire season with the history of a priest saving townspeople from an infamous 1871 inferno. Those echoes of the past do a good job of supporting Leschak’s story, which is the real meat of the book.
Leschak is a legit badass as the commander of a helitack crew battling fires across a large region—but what I related to, deeply, was his approach to leadership, his intellectual struggle with organized religion, and his contemplative nature.
In October 1871, a massive forest fire incinerated the town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin. It was the deadliest fire in North American history, an event so intense that its release of energy was not approximated until the advent of thermo-nuclear weapons. At least 1,200 people perished-some in bizarre and disturbing ways-and the actual number of fatalities is unknown, perhaps as many as 1,500 were lost. Since the Great Chicago Fire occurred at the same time, Peshtigo was overshadowed and almost forgotten.
In 2000, veteran wild-land firefighter Peter Leschak was faced with a hot and challenging fire season, tasked with the leadership…
I got interested in long-distance backpacking in my mid-twenties, looking for an escape from the messy life I had created for myself. I wanted to reinvent myself, and a blog about the Appalachian Trail suggested a perfect solution. After 650 miles on the trail and the death of my mother, I knew I would never be the same. In the years since, I have hiked the Wonderland Trail (as featured in Alone in Wonderland) and the Colorado Trail. Backpacking has become more than an escape – it has become home.
Mary's story shows the harsh reality of being a woman in a man's world – wildland firefighting. Her vulnerability and truth were incredibly relatable to me. The pressure to always be on, always strong, always performing, lest one moment of softness be held up as an example of why women don't belong.
FIRE IN THE HEART is a powerful memoir by a woman, once a shy, insecure schoolgirl, who reinvented herself as a professional wildlands firefighter. Determined to forge herself into a stronger, braver person, Mary devotes herself to fire from the Florida swamp to Alaska's interior. Filled with literal struggles for survival, tough choices and Mary's burning passion for what she does, Fire in the Heart, is an unflinching account of one woman's relationship with fire. But when she loses a close friend to the famous Storm King Mountain forest fire in Colorado, which killed fourteen firefighters, Mary faces the hardest…
I’m a Canadian writer who started writing fiction after a career as a journalist at newspapers across the country. I’ve always marvelled at the diversity of Canada, and I try to portray that diversity in my own stories set in Toronto, one of the world’s most multicultural cities. And I revel in stories by fellow Canadian crime writers, tales filled with First Nations characters, and characters with Ukrainian, Russian, Asian, African, and British backgrounds, stories set in various parts of our far-flung country. The five novels I have focused on here are just a few of my favorites.
Windigo Fire, M.H. Callway’s 2014 debut novel, is set in one of my favorite Canadian locations—the Northern Ontario wilderness. It’s an adventure thriller filled with fast-paced action, psychological suspense, and First Nation legends. It has a fabulous sense of place, and a terrific cast of characters, headed by its Native Canadian protagonist, Danny Bluestone. A truly Canadian crime thriller.
Danny Bluestone, a young Native Canadian drifting through life, settles for a job at a children's camp in his Northern Ontario hometown of Red Dog Lake. Local entrepreneur, Meredith Easter, offers Danny some easy money: play the role of native scout for his wealthy hunting buddies. Danny knows that Easter's roadside attraction, Santa's Fish Camp, is the front for the local grow-op, and probably more, but the money is his way out of Red Dog Lake.
Danny flies the hunters to an island lodge deep in the wilderness. Once there, he learns that he's part of an illegal bear hunt…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
Andrew Vietze was five years old when he told his older sister that one day, he would be a park ranger. Twenty-eight years later, he put on his badge for the first time as a seasonal ranger in one of the premier wilderness areas in the East, Maine’s Baxter State Park. Home of Katahdin and the terminus of the Appalachian Trail, “Forever Wild” Baxter has no pavement, no electricity, no stores, no cell service. As a boy, Vietze imagined a life flying around in helicopters, rescuing hikers off mountaintops, fighting forest fires, chasing wilderness despoilers, and plucking people out of raging rivers. And he's spent the past twenty years doing just that.
Technically not a park ranger (but close enough), Philip Connors works seasonally as a fire lookout in one of the last remaining fire towers in the nation,10,000 feet above sea level in the vast fastness of the Gila National Wilderness of New Mexico. From his 7’ by 7’ tower, he oversees a huge swath of a 2.7 million-acre wilderness that seems to want to burn, seeing more than 30,000 lightning strikes a year. It’s a rugged, remote, lonely landscape – and a singular way of life. Like me, Connors left a job as an editor to take up in the wilderness in 2002, and like me, he returns every season because it’s where he belongs.Fire Season explores the history of the Forest Service, fire management, and wilderness conservation in a can’t-put-it-down fashion.
'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…
As a lover of both fiction and nonfiction, I find that the ultimate pleasure in reading is when the author combines the two without short-changing either. These are books that provide accurate and deep historical background, but also tell stories shaped by that context. These are also books that have intricate, unusual, and effective narrative structures.
This book concerns a group of young firefighters known as smokejumpers and the catastrophic Mann Gulch Forest Fire in Montana in 1949.
Maclean was from the community and worked in the US Forest Service before he became a professor and eventually an author who spent years researching the event. You learn about the physics of forest fires, the invention of the first "escape fire," how multiple and cascading errors can lead to a disastrous outcome, and about the lives and heroics of a group of firefighters.
Interestingly, it is all seen through the journey of a man trying to understand a captivating event from his past. This book falls pretty squarely in the non-fiction category, but has multiple stories interwoven with the facts. It helps that Maclean was not only an author of many nonfiction articles, but also the author of the highly successful novel (and movie) A River Runs…
When Norman Maclean sent the manuscript of A River Runs through It to New York publishers, he received a slew of rejections. One editor, so the story goes, replied, "It has trees in it." Forty years later, the title novella is widely recognized as one of the great American tales of the twentieth century, and Maclean as one of the most beloved writers of our time. Maclean's later triumph, Young Men and Fire, has over the decades also established itself as a classic of the American West. And with this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, a fresh audience will be introduced to Maclean's…
I am an economist who has written broadly on microeconomics, energy and natural resource markets, and environmental economics. My recent work in environmental economics has focused on climate change, and I’ve published a book and many articles on the topic. I think it’s important to understand that while there is a lot we understand about climate change, there is also much we don’t understand, and what the uncertainty implies about what we should do. My concern is the possibility of a climate catastrophe. What are the chances, and what should we do? Those questions have driven much of my research and writing.
Nordhaus was one of the first economists to explain the nature of climate change and why dealing with it is of economic importance. In this book, he uses his DICE (Dynamic Integrated Climate and Economy) model to help explain --- at a textbook level --- how unrestricted GHG emissions can cause climate change to occur and lead to serious problems in the future. He also utilizes the model to illustrate some of the uncertainties we face when thinking about the climate system and when trying to predict the changes to expect under different policies. The book thereby provides students (and others) with a good introduction to climate change policy.
Citizen Scientist begins with this extraordinary statement by the Keeper of Entomology at the London Museum of Natural History, “Study any obscure insect for a week and you will then know more than anyone else on the planet.”
As the author chases the obscure Western red-bellied tiger beetle across New…
I’ve been a biblical scholar for over 35 years and have spent a lot of time reading and writing academic volumes, analyzing arguments, and teaching diverse audiences. However, some of my formative experiences were as a child on my grandparents’ North Carolina farm, to which I still feel an almost elemental connection. Perhaps that farm (and my vegetable gardening) first sparked my interest in the environment. My interest turned to advocacy through research, which set me on the path to grasping the urgency of the climate crisis and my conviction that everything must reflect this reality. I’ve poured over the scientific reports (such as by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and read lots of nonfiction.
I am in awe of Tim Beal’s ability to write about heavy subjects engagingly and invitingly. His question is deadly serious: now that humanity faces extinction due to the climate crisis, how should we live? He finds answers (or at least guideposts) in an honest (and, for some, untraditional) reading of the Bible, in which he finds resources for what faces us.
This book helped me face climate realities without dissolving into despair. I felt he was helping me reach the “acceptance” stage of grief about Earth.
With faith, hope, and compassion, acclaimed religion scholar Timothy Beal shows us how to navigate the inevitabilities of the climate crisis and the very real—and very near—possibility of human extinction
What if it’s too late to save ourselves from climate crisis? When Time is Short is a meditation for what may be a finite human future that asks how we got here to help us imagine a different relationship to the natural world.
Modern capitalism, as it emerged, drew heavily upon the Christian belief in human exceptionalism and dominion over the planet, and these ideas still undergird our largely secular…
I’m the grandson of a coal miner from a multi-generational, Ohio family. What matters most to me is having some integrity and being morally okay with folks. I never thought of myself as an environmentalist, just as someone trying to figure out what we should be learning to be decent people in this sometimes messed-up world. From there, I was taken into our environmental situation, its planetary injustice, and then onto studying the history of colonialism. This adventure cracked open my midwestern common sense and made me rethink things. Happily, it has only reinforced my commitment to, and faith in, moral relations, giving our word, being accountable, and caring.
Steve’s book is analytically challenging, but he has great examples and a knack for conceptualizing the core problems that are making it so hard for our world to grapple with climate change and things like mass extinction. He shows how there are three interlocking problems that all go back to how the modern state system was created as something competitive and uncoordinated, abstract from the land it’s on, and short-sighted with its politics.
Climate change is arguably the great problem confronting humanity, but we have done little to head off this looming catastrophe. In The Perfect Moral Storm, philosopher Stephen Gardiner illuminates our dangerous inaction by placing the environmental crisis in an entirely new light, considering it as an ethical failure. Gardiner clarifies the moral situation, identifying the temptations (or "storms") that make us vulnerable to a certain kind of corruption. First, the world's most affluent nations are tempted to pass on the cost of climate change to the poorer and weaker citizens of the world. Second, the present generation is tempted to…
I'm co-founder of a grassroots social justice, civic engagement, and service organization called ForwardCT, which I started with my friend and current state representative Eleni Kavros DeGraw with the intention of mobilizing community-centered action. Our work centers on these four pillars: Connect, Inform, Serve, and Lead. Those pillars guide my work as chair of my town’s Clean Energy Commission, as teacher and facilitator of workshops and events, and as an author of books for young people. I'm drawn to the powerful use of storytelling as a tool for starting conversations, stirring up “good trouble,” and inspiring activism. Read a book, approach your library or town to host a community conversation, leave with actionable takeaways, repeat!
I chose Lyme: The First Epidemic of Climate Change because I live in Connecticut and my own family and friend group have been gravely impacted by tick-borne infections. In fact, the subplot of my novel focuses on the frustrating story of a family seeking answers to this “mystery” illness.
We are at a moment where climate change is accelerating new and worsening pathogenic diseases and public health isn’t catching up fast enough. Mary Beth Pfeiffer provides a well-researched glimpse into the politics and pain of tick-borne infections in a climate-changing world.
I recommend this book as a community conversation starter because, more and more, citizens are coming together to share medical resources and put pressure on the public health community to act.
"Superbly written and researched." -Booklist "Builds a strong case." -Kirkus Lyme disease is spreading rapidly around the globe as ticks move into places they could not survive before. The first epidemic to emerge in the era of climate change, the disease infects half a million people in the US and Europe each year, and untold multitudes in Canada, China, Russia, and Australia. Mary Beth Pfeiffer shows how we have contributed to this growing menace, and how modern medicine has underestimated its danger. She tells the heart-rending stories of families destroyed by a single tick bite, of children disabled, and of…
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…
I’m a science fiction writer who loves my chosen genre for the promises it makes for the worlds that we can have—and the warnings that it offers for the worlds that might be ours if we don’t take care. I’ve picked books for people who like their thinking to be challenged, and who also long for the world to be a much better place. These are the kinds of books I love to read—and the kinds of books I try to write.
Earth has suffered devastating environmental collapse and is now a world of jungles and monsters. The last remnants of humanity are split between those clinging to the surface, and those who have removed themselves to the upper atmosphere. We follow Pearl, living in an isolated forest region, suddenly taken to the stars. A vivid and luscious reimagining of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea.
"A richly imagined eco-gothic tale." - The Guardian
"Exquisitely realised." - The Times
After the ravages of the Green Winter, Earth is a place of deep jungles and monstrous animals. The last of the human race is divided into surface dwellers and the people who live in the Upper Settlement, a ring perched at the edge of the Earth s atmosphere.
Bearing witness to this divided planet is Pearl, a young techie with a thread of shuvani blood, who lives in the isolated forests of Gobari, navigating her mad mother and the strange blue light in the sky. But Pearl…
