The Big Burn, The by Timothy Egan

The Big Burn, The by Timothy Egan

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

"Egan brings a touching humanity to this story of valour and cowardice in the face of a national catastrophe, paying respectful attention to Roosevelt's great dream of conservation and of an America 'for the little man'" -Publishers Weekly, starred review"

Timothy Egan works for The New York Times as a national enterprise correspondent. He was part of a team of reporters who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for the paper's series on racial attitudes in modern America. He is the author of four books, the most recent of which, The Worst Hard Time: The Hidden Story of People Who Experienced the Great American Dust Bowl (2006), won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2006. Amy Pastan, a former editor and researcher at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, is now an independent editor and scholar. W. has written the preface. The Library of Congress's director of publishing, Ralph Eubanks.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780547394602
ISBN 10	0547394608
Title	The Big Burn, The
Author	Timothy Egan
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
Year published	2010-09-07
Number of pages	352
Prizes	Winner of Washington State Book Award (History/Biography) 2010
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.