Fire Season


Book Description

“Fire Season both evokes and honors the great hermit celebrants of nature, from Dillard to Kerouac to Thoreau—and I loved it.” —J.R. Moehringer, author of The Tender Bar “[Connors’s] adventures in radical solitude make for profoundly absorbing, restorative reading.” —Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air Phillip Connors is a major new voice in American nonfiction, and his remarkable debut, Fire Season, is destined to become a modern classic. An absorbing chronicle of the days and nights of one of the last fire lookouts in the American West, Fire Season is a marvel of a book, as rugged and soulful as Matthew Crawford’s bestselling Shop Class as Soulcraft, and it immediately places Connors in the august company of Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, Barry Lopez, and others in the respected fraternity of hard-boiled nature writers.




Forgotten Fires


Book Description

A common stereotype about American Indians is that for centuries they lived in static harmony with nature, in a pristine wilderness that remained unchanged until European colonization. Omer C. Stewart was one of the first anthropologists to recognize that Native Americans made significant impact across a wide range of environments. Most important, they regularly used fire to manage plant communities and associated animal species through varied and localized habitat burning. In Forgotten Fires, editors Henry T. Lewis and M. Kat Anderson present Stewart's original research and insights, written in the 1950s yet still provocative today. Significant portions of Stewart's text have not been available until now, and Lewis and Anderson set Stewart's findings in the context of current knowledge about Native hunter-gatherers and their uses of fire.




The Art of Fire


Book Description

Fire can fascinate, inspire, capture the imagination and bring families and communities together. It has the ability to amaze, energise and touch something deep inside all of us. For thousands of years, at every corner of the globe, humans have been huddling around fires: from the basic and primitive essentials of light, heat, energy and cooking, through to modern living, fire plays a central role in all of our lives. The ability to accurately and quickly light a fire is one of the most important skills anyone setting off on a wilderness adventure could possess, yet very little has been written about it. Through his narrative Hume also meditates on the wider topics surrounding fire and how it shapes the world around us.




To Build a Fire


Book Description

Describes the experiences of a newcomer to the Yukon when he attempts to hike through the snow to reach a mining claim.




Fire Along the Sky


Book Description

With epic sweep and breathtaking adventure, Sara Donati’s bestselling saga of an Early American family’s struggle for survival in the Northeast wilderness continues with the story of an indomitable woman and an unforgettable journey of redemption across a young nation threatened by the flames of war. The year is 1812 and Hannah Bonner has returned to her family’s mountain cabin in Paradise. But Nathaniel and Elizabeth Bonner can see that Hannah is not the same woman as when she left. For their daughter has come home without her husband and without her son…and with a story of loss and tragedy that she can’t bear to tell. Yet as Hannah resumes her duties as a gifted healer among the sick and needy, she finds that she is also slowly healing herself. Little does she realize that she is about to be called away to face her greatest challenge ever. As autumn approaches, news of the latest conflict with Britain finds the young men of Paradise—including eighteen-year-old Daniel Bonner—eager to take up arms. Against their better judgment, Nathaniel and Elizabeth must let him go, just as they must let his twin sister Lily, a stubborn beauty, pursue her independence in Montreal. But on the eve of the War of 1812, an unexpected guest arrives from Scotland: It is the Bonners’ distant cousin, the newly widowed Jennet Scott of Carryckcastle. Far from home, Lily and Jennet will each learn the price of pursuing their dreams and the possibility of true love. But it’s Hannah herself who must risk everything once more—this time to save Daniel, who’s been taken prisoner by the British. As the distant thunder of war threatens Paradise, Hannah may learn to live—and maybe love—again in one final act of courage, duty, and sacrifice. A gifted writer, a master storyteller, and a first-rate historian, Sara Donati has written a powerful, poignant, and movingly romantic novel that chronicles the lives and adventures of a family as compelling and unforgettable as any in American fiction.




Fires in the Wilderness


Book Description

It's the Great Depression, and times are hard. Children are starving. Families are scraping by on government handouts and the kindness of strangers. There is no work to be had and no money to be earned. Teenager Jarek Sokolowski and his brother take action to save their loved ones--they apply for jobs in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Fires in the Wilderness chronicles the journey of a pair of Polish boys from Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1934. After some training, they are shipped far from home to a work camp in the wilds of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The friends take on backbreaking jobs that leave them bruised and blistered. To make matters worse, their work leader is a cruel bully who loves to stir up trouble. When wildfires sweep across the northern wilderness, the CCC boys are pressed into duty. As the fire grows out of control, several boys find themselves trapped by walls of flame and Jarek is faced with a terrible choice. Through their work and struggles, the Civilian Conservation Corps boys learn hard lessons about life and the importance of character, teamwork, and leadership.Fires in the Wilderness is an inspiring story that provides readers with a peek into the past through the eyes of an immigrant boy.




Wild Fire


Book Description

The heat of passion—and danger—rises like jungle fire in this novel of the Leopard people by #1 New York Times bestselling author Christine Feehan… Called on a dangerous assignment, leopard shifter Conner Vega returns to the Panama rainforest of his homeland, looking every bit the civilized male. But as a member of the most lethal of the shifter tribes, he doesn’t have a civilized bone in his body. He carries the scent of a wild animal in its prime, he bears the soul-crushing sins of past kills—and he’s branded by the scars of shame inflicted by the woman he betrayed. Isabeau Chandler’s a Borneo shifter who’s never forgiven Conner—or forgotten him. The mating urge is still with her, and when she crosses Conner’s path, passions run like wild fire. But as Conner’s mission draws Isabeau closer, another betrayal lies waiting in the shadows—and it’s the most perilous and intimate one of all.




Wilderness Survival GUIDE


Book Description

The wilderness is a hard place. But it’s as crucial for our lives as it is painful. While a desert season feels terribly wrong, and loneliness and despair may seem to reign, God is with you and He desires to use the wilderness for your eternal good. To reap its benefits, however, you must understand its nature and purpose. That’s the reason for this book. It will look to the Bible as a spiritual “Survival Guide” for the desert — the supreme source of wisdom both for enduring the wilderness, as well as navigating safely through it to God’s promised destination.




Fire Season


Book Description

'I've watched deer and elk frolic in the meadow below me, and pine trees explode in a blue ball of smoke. If there's a better job anywhere on the planet, I'd like to know what it is.' For nearly a decade, Philip Connors has spent half of each year in a small room at the top of a tower, on top of a mountain, alone in millions of acres of remote American wilderness. His job: to look for wildfires. Capturing the wonder and grandeur of this most unusual job and place, Fire Season evokes both the eerie pleasure of solitude and the majesty, might and beauty of untamed fire at its wildest. Connors' time up on the peak is filled with drama - there are fires large and small; spectacular midnight lightning storms and silent mornings awakening above the clouds; surprise encounters with smokejumpers, black bears, and an abandoned, dying fawn. Filled with Connors' heartfelt reflections on our place in the wild, Fire Season is an instant modern classic: a remarkable memoir that is at once an homage to the beauty of nature, the blessings of solitude, and the freedom of the independent spirit. Advance praise for Fire Season: 'A masterwork of close observation, deep reflection, and hard-won wisdom . . . an unforgettable reckoning with the American land' Philip Gourevitch 'His adventures in radical solitude make for profoundly absorbing, restorative reading' Walter Kirn




The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee


Book Description

History has been kind to Robert E. Lee. Woodrow Wilson believed General Lee was a “model to men who would be morally great.” Douglas Southall Freeman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his four-volume biography of Lee, described his subject as “one of a small company of great men in whom there is no inconsistency to be explained, no enigma to be solved.” Winston Churchill called him “one of the noblest Americans who ever lived.” Until recently, there was even a stained glass window devoted to Lee's life at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Immediately after the Civil War, however, many northerners believed Lee should be hanged for treason and war crimes. Americans will be surprised to learn that in June of 1865 Robert E. Lee was indicted for treason by a Norfolk, Virginia grand jury. In his instructions to the grand jury, Judge John C. Underwood described treason as “wholesale murder,” and declared that the instigators of the rebellion had “hands dripping with the blood of slaughtered innocents.” In early 1866, Lee decided against visiting friends while in Washington, D.C. for a congressional hearing, because he was conscious of being perceived as a “monster” by citizens of the nation’s capital. Yet somehow, roughly fifty years after his trip to Washington, Lee had been transformed into a venerable American hero, who was highly regarded by southerners and northerners alike. Almost a century after Appomattox, Dwight D. Eisenhower had Lee’s portrait on the wall of his White House office. The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee tells the story of the forgotten legal and moral case that was made against the Confederate general after the Civil War. The actual indictment went missing for 72 years. Over the past 150 years, the indictment against Lee after the war has both literally and figuratively disappeared from our national consciousness. In this book, Civil War historian John Reeves illuminates the incredible turnaround in attitudes towards the defeated general by examining the evolving case against him from 1865 to 1870 and beyond.