An intimate account of what it means to be a female wildland firefighter.
Essayist and novelist Emerick (The Geography of Water, 2015) dissects the passion that kept her on the fire line for more than 20 years. Just out of college in the mid-1980s, she traveled to Olympic National Park for a summer job. Insecure but seeking to break out of her shell, she accepted an assignment on the fire line during an especially nasty fire season. Though not convinced firefighting was the right path, Emerick imagined the new self that would result from the excitement and stress of the job: “The person I imagined I would become by fighting fire was someone better: tan, long-braided, self-sufficient, strong.” The author’s choice led to two decades of fighting fires in multiple states, all the while absorbing the incredible sights, smells, and sounds of fire. Emerick vividly recounts the extremely taxing physical requirements, the deadly conditions firefighters consistently endure, and the ever present lure of adventure and camaraderie each fire provides. The author explores the implications of working in a male-dominated field and how that environment has improved during her tenure. She also shares her knowledge of different species of trees and how each burns as well as the tools and equipment needed to fight fires. Crisscrossing the country with the seasons, the author fought fires in the Western U.S during the summer and worked winters in the Florida swamps. Emerick is candid about her work’s toll on unfulfilled romances and a broken marriage. After years as a firefighter, Emerick questions the environmental policy of snuffing out all fires and “whether all this firefighting was really good for the forest, if it might not better just to let it burn.”
A moving and bittersweet memoir of a woman’s love affair with a unique profession.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62872-843-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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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