What I've Read: The Big Burn

On my Hawaiian vacation, I was able to bang through one more book, a fantastic book called The Big Burn.

I read one of Timothy Egan's previous nonfiction title, The Worst Hard Time, which was about as depressing as it could get in terms of fully describing the hell a group of over a large swath of a nation could experience. Here was a fantastic account of the Dust Bowl, where in 1935 the largest dust storm in America history swept across the plains and laid waste to just about everything. It's pretty affecting stuff, reading about people and animals living and breathing dust and dirt for days and weeks at a time. Not the most uplifting tale I admit, but something that is worth reading.

Whereas that book dealt with a dust storm, The Big Burn deals well, as you can imagine, with a rather large fire. In fact, the largest wildfire ever, one that devoured a couple states and tore through a ton of national forests. More than 100 firefighters died, and towns (well, if you could call them towns since this was 1910 and cars were not prominent yet) were completely erased from existence. The book's photos and accounts are really powerful stuff.

Something that Egan does nicely is overlay the fire's beginning, middle and end with the story of two men who helped shape the forestry service around that same time, Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt. He gives a nice overview of how both these men came to be friends and allies in somewhat creating the first real conservation movement in the United States, and also how they came to in many ways create the Forest Service. By weaving these two threads together, you get a cool picture of how politics and environment fought each other in certain ways and then helped each other achieve other end goals by almost sheer accident.

I'll gladly recommend this book to those who loved Worst Hard Times, and if you've read neither, these are fantastic books that give your insights into particular events in American history that shaped the larger course of politics and other issue areas well beyond their brief moment in time.