Fire Weather
The Making of a Beast
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4.7 • 26 Ratings
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Winner of the 2024 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing • Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction • Winner of the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize • Winner of the 2024 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize • Finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction • Finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction • One of the New York Times’ Top Ten Books of The Year • Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction • Finalist for the 2024 Lane Anderson Award
A stunning account of the colossal wildfire at Fort McMurray, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind from the award-winning, best-selling author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce.
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian • TIME • The Globe and Mail • The New Yorker • Financial Times • CBC • Smithsonian • Air Mail Weekly • Slate • NPR • Toronto Star • The Washington Post • The Times • Orion Magazine
In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada's petroleum industry and America's biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.
For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.
With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America's oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant's urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Like an ominous real-life fable, this investigation tells the story of an oil town that indirectly aided its own destruction when its seemingly endless natural resources ended up fuelling a new kind of apocalyptic wildfire stoked by climate change. Journalist John Vaillant chronicles the terrifying 2016 wildfires in Fort McMurray, Alberta, which, at their peak, unleashed the thermal power of four atomic bombs—each as devastating as the bombing of Hiroshima—per minute on the city. Vaillant does a remarkable job showing both the close-up details of melted infrastructure and smoke clouds that caused their own lightning, while zooming out to consider the big picture of what fossil fuels are doing to the world. He expertly wields all kinds of evidence from hard statistics to terrifying dash-cam footage to issue a warning for the future: You might think that far-northern, cool-weather Fort McMurray wouldn’t get this kind of fiery disaster, so climate change might be coming for all of us. Whether you have a head for climate science or just a concern about the world’s changing weather, Fire Weather is an eye-opening look at what fossil fuels do to the Earth’s forests, cities, and people.
