Thorough, disciplined account of a terrifying fire that ripped through the Okanogan National Forest near Washington State’s Canadian border in 2001.
Maclean begins with a nod to one of his previous books on the subject of firefighting. A number of new safety measures were instituted after 14 firefighters perished in the 1994 South Canyon tragedy analyzed in Fire on the Mountain (1999), but few could have predicted that the measures would be tested so soon. Just seven years after South Canyon, an improperly extinguished campfire abandoned during a smoking-hot summer in the North Cascades mountain range provided another stern trial of the firefighting community. Maclean divides the story into three parts. He begins by outlining the various people who headed into the woods to do battle with the fire on that fateful day, highlighting character traits that would play a vital part in the tragedy. The second section concentrates on how the fire was tackled, cataloguing mishaps and errors that included problems with the hoses, failure to obtain helicopter support and neglect that led to innocent bystanders Bruce and Paula Hagemeyer becoming entangled in events. The author comments on these incidents while describing a fire spiraling dangerously out of control to claim the lives of four firefighters and injure many others. The final chapters focus on the fire’s aftermath, with the deceased’s families quickly turning from sorrow to bitterness and recriminations, especially after the release of a report by the Occupational Safety and Health Commission that suggested the dead may have ignored orders. Maclean mostly keeps his opinions to himself, offering a narrative that comprehends many conflicting viewpoints.
A richly descriptive chronicle of disaster from an expert on the subject.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-8050-7578-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
Categories: HISTORY | NATURE | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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