Young Men and Fire

I don't do much reading, but this book kept me captivated from the moment I picked it up. Books based on true stories can be dry and uninteresting; however, MacLean combines fact, speculation, and emotion in a way that keeps the reader clamoring for more. I was inspired to read "Young Men and Fire" after hearing Richard Shindell sing James Keelaghan's song, "Cold Missouri Waters" (based on MacLean's book) on the "Cry Cry Cry" CD. After reading this book, I feel compelled to visit the 13 crosses marking the tragic ending for those men on that Mann Gulch hillside.

I read this book after A River Runs Through It, and found that while I had liked RIVER I couldn't put this one down. Unfinished at the time of the author's death the book has some bumpy spots, but the language and the mixture of story and theory will keep you up late and come back to you again and again, especially if you are a lover of the country that Maclean invokes so well. I should warn you that friends that I have sicced on this book have either loved it with me or hated it, and parts are not for the faint of heart, but this is definitely a book to keep.

Norman Maclean was haunted by two major events during his life, the death of his brother as told in A River Runs Through It and the Mann Gulch fire that is the subject of Young Men and Fire. The former became the basis for one of the best American novels, but the latter manifested itself in a work that was incomplete on Maclean's death.

None the less, Young Men and Fire is a powerful account of one man's efforts to come to terms with tragedy. At the outset Maclean attempts to understand the Mann Gulch fire as a physical event involving flame and the death of the young Smokejumpers. His painstaking analysis is driven by an emotional need to understand the event. This process leads him ultimately to seek a spiritual understanding of the tragedy. Maclean's narrative of working with mathematicians who model fires for the Forest Service is the most humanizing description of mathematics that I have ever read, despite Maclean's eventual rejection of a reasoned analysis as a source of closure.

Interestingly, Maclean was not directly involved in the incident, but rather became attached to it through his memory of himself as a young man in the Forest Service. To feel so strongly about something to which one only has an abstract connection is remarkable.

When this book was reviewed on the front page of the "New York Times Book Review," I noted the subject and thought it would not be my cup of tea. The review changed my mind and it was only a moment from the time I finished it to being on the way to the bookstore to get the book and read it immediately. I was not disappointed. This is certainly one of the two or three best books I have ever read. Obviously, the quality of the writing is important. But, so, too, is the fact that this is simultaneously the story of a particular event in a particular time, and the quest of an aging man to resolve in his own mind what happened forty years before to young men fighting a fire in a place near where the author himself, as a youth, used to fight fires. I was more interested in the author's physical and mental determination; a colleague to whom I recommended the book was more interested in the sections that discuss the science of fire and fire-fighting. A rereading will probably lead to a fascination with some other element in the book. But, then, that is probably one of the signs of a great text. Since reading this book, I have been on the look-out for another book of this kind. So far, I have not found one. At times, I have seen this book linked to works that discuss the death of mountain climbers and the like. But MacLean did not write that kind of book. And as far as I can tell, no one has written another book like his. Not finding another book like this is existentially exhilerating. But, for a reader, there is also regret.

I picked up this book by chance, captivated by the title and by the jacket. Since I first read it seven years or so ago, I have returned to it time and time and time again. (Indeed, I am using sections of it in a course I will be teaching soon on men and masculinity).

The publishing world has seen a plethora of non-fiction books on tragedies and natural disasters in recent years, with "The Perfect Storm" and "Into Thin Air" perhaps the most successful. But those two bestsellers pale in comparison with the subtlety, the grace, and the sheer power of Maclean's story of discovering what happened to a dozen young firejumpers on a steep Montana hillside many years ago. In the final fifty pages, as remembrances of survivors mix with a technical discussion of wind and flames, Maclean's prose is so vivid, so pure, so unadornedly beautiful that I had to put the book down three or four times because my eyes were filling with tears. 'Tis a rare work of non-fiction that can do that!

I am a deeply urban person. I know nothing of forestry or firefighting. I have never been to Montana. And I was gripped by this book from start to finish, even as Maclean skilfully avoids even the slightest shred of bathos or melodrama. It is a marvelous meditation on heroism and death, and on masculinity itself, and well, well worth the read.