Big Burn by Jeanette Ingold
A New York Times Bestseller. A Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Entertainment Weekly, and Amazon Best Book of the Year.A dramatic account of the worst forest fire in American history by the author of the National Book Award-winning The Worst Hard Time.
On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forest of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men -- college boys, day workers, immigrants from mining camps -- to fight the fire. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them.
Timothy Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched ranges against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force. Equally dramatic is the larger story he tells of outsize president Teddy Roosevelt ad his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by and preserved for every citizen.
An important cautionary tale for these days that also reads like a classic adventure story. -- Washington Times
Timothy Egan is a national enterprise reporter for The New York Times. In 2001, he was part of a team of reporters awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the paper's series exploring racial attitudes across contemporary America. He is the author of four books, including The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (2006), which won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2006. Amy Pastan is an independent editor and scholar, formerly of the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The Preface is by W. Ralph Eubanks, director of publishing at The Library of Congress.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780618968411 |
| ISBN 10 | 0618968415 |
| Title | Big Burn |
| Author | Jeanette Ingold |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
| Year published | 2009-10-01 |
| Number of pages | 336 |
| Prizes | Winner of Reading the West (Nonfiction) 2010, Winner of Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award (Regional Book) 2010, Commended for Spur Awards (Nonfiction-Contemporary) 2010, Commended for Montana Book Award 2009 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |