Young Men and Fire – Norman Maclean
On August 5, 1949, a crew of smokejumpers from the United States Forest Service parachuted into Mann Gulch, a remote canyon along the Missouri River in Montana, to fight what seemed to be a routine forest fire. Within hours, the fire exploded into a blowup that raced up the steep slope faster than the men could run. Thirteen firefighters died. Only three survived, including the crew foreman, Wagner Dodge, who lit an escape fire and lay down in its ashes as the main fire passed over him.
Norman Maclean, the author of A River Runs Through It, spent much of the last part of his life trying to understand what happened in Mann Gulch. Young Men and Fire, published after his death, is the result of that long quest.
Maclean returned to the site again and again, interviewed the survivors and the families of those who died, studied official reports and worked with fire scientists to reconstruct the fire’s behavior and the timing of the men’s final moments. He examines the decisions made that day, the controversy over Dodge’s escape fire, and the questions left unanswered by official investigations.
But the book is much more than an investigation. Maclean reflects deeply on tragedy, courage, youth, death and the search for meaning, and on his own relationship with the forests of Montana, where he worked as a young man for the Forest Service.
Written in powerful, meditative prose, Young Men and Fire won the National Book Critics Circle Award and is a profound read for lovers of nature writing, history and literary nonfiction.
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