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    Young Men and Fire: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition
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    Young Men and Fire: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition
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    Young Men and Fire: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition
    Ebook394 pages6 hours

    Young Men and Fire: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition

    By Norman Maclean and Timothy Egan

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    About this ebook

    A devastating and lyrical work of nonfiction, Young Men and Fire describes the events of August 5, 1949, when a crew of fifteen of the US Forest Service’s elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of the men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for forty years, Norman Maclean puts together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy in Young Men and Fire, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

    Alongside Maclean’s now-canonical A River Runs through It and Other Stories, Young Men and Fire is recognized today as a classic of the American West. This twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Maclean’s later triumph—the last book he would write—includes a powerful new foreword by Timothy Egan, author of The Big Burn and The Worst Hard Time. As moving and profound as when it was first published, Young Men and Fire honors the literary legacy of a man who gave voice to an essential corner of the American soul.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateMay 1, 2017
    ISBN9780226450490
    Author

    Norman Maclean

    Born in Glasgow in 1936, Norman Maclean was educated at school and university in Glasgow, before going on to teach all over Scotland. He garnered much fame after winning two Gold Medals at the National Mod - for poetry and singing - in the same year, 1967, the only person ever to do so. Shortly afterwards he began a career, as he would say himself, as a clown, and it is in that role, and that of a musician, that he is still best-known today.

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    Reviews for Young Men and Fire

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Young Men and Fire is the story of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire in Montana. It killed 13 young smoke jumpers making it a pivotal event in US firefighting history. Much was gained from their sacrifice, the methods and practices of firefighting were forever changed. Maclean atomized the roughly 60-minute event in detail, going over every detail and possible lesson that could be gleaned. His writing is fantastic and it holds up well until about the last 50 pages or so when it becomes too geeky (the mathematics of fire etc). The human drama is unforgettable, when I think of firefighters from now on, this incident from the early heroic days will stand out.I looked up Mann Gulch on Google Maps and incredibly there is a wildfire occurring when the picture was taken from space. I don't know if Google did this on purpose, or sheer "luck", but it adds to the books atmosphere to see the valley in the middle of an actual fire.
    • 3/5
      Interesting book - but a bit too technical for me. I am interested in forest fires and the history of fire fighting as I live in the forest, but some portions of the book were pretty dry. It was interesting how Maclean would switch from that type of writing into his poetic, emotional, and spiritual style.
    • 5/5
      Catastrophes are only a part of the story of the crew of fifteen smoke jumpers who, in August 1949, stepped into the sky above the mountains of western Montana. Their story is the focal point of this fine narrative, but there is so much more that I have stopped in my read to share a brief quotation that both tells a tiny part of the story, but also provides a peek into the context that is as vast as the mountains themselves. The beauty of this book is not only in the story of those young men and the fire they leapt into, but also the way it is told by Norman Maclean."Yet we should also go on wondering if there is not some shape, form, design as of artistry in this universe we are entering that is composed of catastrophes and missing parts. Whether we are coming up or down the Gates of the Mountains, catastrophes everywhere enfold us as they do the river, and catastrophes may seem to be only the visible remains of defunct happenings of millions of years ago and the Rocky Mountains only the disintegrated explosions that darkened skies also millions of years ago and left behind the world dusted with gritty silicone. At least I should recognize this as much the same stuff as the little pieces of glass which in 1980 Mount St. Helens in Washington sprinkled over my cabin in Montana six hundred miles away, and anyone coming down the Gates of the Mountains can see that the laminations of ocean beds compressed in the cliffs on one side of the river match the laminations on the opposite cliffs, and, looking up, can see that an arch, now disappeared into sky, originally join both cliffs. There are also missing parts to the story of the lonely crosses ahead of us, almost invisible in deep grass near the top of a mountain. What if, by searching the earth and even the sky for these missing parts, we should find enough of them to see catastrophe change into the shape of remembered tragedy? Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts---hopefully, even the arch to the sky." (pp 46-47)
    • 5/5
      Forest fires are expected to be put out by 10 o'clock in the morning after Smoke Jumpers are dropped on them. Alas, in the Mann Gulch fire of August, 1949, nearly all the 15 Smoke Jumpers (plus one ranger, already on the ground) were dead within two hours of being dropped on site. With superhuman effort, two managed to scramble to safety in the light of rapidly-moving flames and another one, the foreman, was able to build a last-minute escape fire.With his forestry background, the author combined knowledge and ability to write beautifully to create a disaster book masterpiece. He excelled, especially, at telling the story of the fire and also telling the "what changed as a result." The lengthy middle section of the book--his attempt to track down information--seemed unfinished. This is not surprising because his search for answers and his writing were ongoing at the time of his death, before this book was completed.Memorable writing. For instance, from the final portion: "From the elevation of retrospect we can see it all coming together more clearly and sooner than those who were there and running. For us the signs are many that in minutes the blowup would bring a total convergence of sky, young men, and fire, and after that, the dark; on the top of the hill, though there are only occasional partings in the smoke, the flames themselves were blinding and those inside the flames and smoke could no longer see what was happening to them and would happen next."I loved, too, how the author managed to suggest what the dying Smoke Jumpers may have felt. He does so in a beautiful, reassuring way.Due to the fact that the foreman built an escape fire at the last minute, something that hadn't been done before, this fire remains controversial, a mystery. Did the escape fire contribute to the deaths of some of the Smoke Jumpers or could it have saved them? Perhaps if the author could've finished it before he'd died, we might have a better answer.This is a truly fascinating book, in need of some polishing, but unforgettable nonetheless. Very highly recommended!!
    • 5/5
      Powerful, riveting, and moving account of one man's (Norman Maclean) journey of uncovering the truth behind the death of 13 young smokejumpers on the Mann Gulch fire in Montana in 1949. It's a story of the incredible power of wind, weather, and wildfire, but it's also the story of life. It's the story of survival and remembrance. It's the story of how science and understanding of fire behavior has changed how we fight fires. A tremendous read, even if Maclean does occasionally wonder off the path.
    • 4/5
      I imagine when most people here someone say, "He died too young," they're imagining someone around 50 or 60, maybe even pushing to 70 with the quality of life improvements and medical leaps being made. I'm going to appropriate that quote for Norman Maclean who died at 82. He was an amazing story-teller (and that's different than a writer I feel, even though he was a great writer as well). Young Men and Fire was an intensive research-laden book about a fire that had killed more than a dozen young smokejumpers nearly five decades before the book was published. Yet, it's still riveting. In reality, it's not just about the tragedy, but it's about a bit of mystery and potential cover-ups and remembering and forgetting and the obsession of one man (Maclean) to deliver a story he wants the world to know about as somewhat of a tribute to the young men who lost their lives. As for "dying too young," Maclean actually died before the book was completed and so it does seem to lose some of his voice towards the end - he started to publish late in life and it still strikes me that the world lost a great talent almost before it was recognized.Back to the book - for the first 250 pages, Maclean's master-storyteller talents are displayed in full. However, the book doesn't hold up as well as the last 50 pages come up. It's too science-heavy and seems to lack Maclean's voice. I could believe he actually wrote what's on those pages, but I feel like he was only assembling his thoughts and had he more time, would have crafted even the science into something poetic (the reader will encounter examples of this earlier in the book).So, by the time of his death Maclean had a book about water and a book about fire. Given more time, one has to wonder if the other classical elements of air and earth would have emerged in literary form from this amazing storyteller.
    • 5/5
      The tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire of 1949 in Montana cut thirteen lives short. A group of smokejumpers (parachute firefighters) sent out to contain a fire were trapped by the fire themselves and died all within a quarter of an hour. They might have survived if they had followed their leader or if they had had better training or if they worked together.The book is a tribute to a group of young daredevils. One had survived the cold hell of Bastogne to die by fire. Another had braved the seas of WWII to perish in the mountains. At the fringe of civilization, together with the local drunks and never-do-wells, they were sent to battle nature. Nature both splendid and terrible, forceful and dangerous. This book is both a report of the disaster and an analysis of its group and leadership processes. It served as the basis for Karl E. Weick's must read paper). McLean resolves puzzle by puzzle to reconstruct the last minutes of their lives in painstaking detail. This book is also an old man's obsessive search for truth. McLean was 47 years old when the tragedy happened. He was 74 when he started working on this book. He tracked down archival information, interviewed and pestered witnesses and relatives. The US Forest Service both learned from the tragedy (and prevented a reoccurence by changing its training methods) and covered up its mistakes by influencing witnesses, altering their testimonies and tampering with evidence. McLean with all the time of a lonely retiree tracks down every path, climbs Mann Gulch multiple times (together with two survivors). The book becomes his life's work and purpose. Although, for all practical purposes he has uncovered everything, there is to know about the disaster, he soldiers on, investigates, questions himself, chasing the white whale. Young men and fire is also a portrait of an old man, clinging on to life, wanting to know, knowing that soon all his knowledge will disappear forever.Highly recommended. A must read for everybody interested in small-unit interactions and decision-making processes.
    • 4/5
      Maclean didn't get to finish editing this book, and the last third feels rougher than the rest. Still, this thoughtful, book length essay is amazing. The author spirals three times through the story of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire that claimed the lives of a dozen smokejumpers. Each pass, he brings the reader closer to the unknowable - what it must have felt like to flee from the fire; how each of the smokejumpers must have made his decision to keep running for the ridgeline or hunker down and hope to survive. As the book progresses, it balances on an increasingly fine edge - on the one hand, the reconstructed details function like a zoom lens, taking us ever closer to the critical, fatal moments of the tragedy; while on the other, the truth of what must have happened slides ever further out of reach, lost behind the limits of our ability to know. Though the title refers to 'Young Men', this felt like anything but a young man's book. Reading it a few years ago, I loved the writing and was moved by the story, but felt I was skipping over depths that I'd only really be able to understand with the passage of years and years of time. Perhaps it's time to try reading it again.
    • 5/5
      I read this book over 16 years ago yet every summer year-in and year-out, whenever I hear about raging forset fires somewhere in America or anywhere really; this book comes to mind. It's a true story about forest firefights known as Smokejumpers because they parachuted into the fire area in order to fight the fire. This is a gripping story that takes plance in Montana in 1949.
    • 3/5
      Thirteen young smokejumpers were killed during the tragic Mann Gulch fire in Montana in 1949. Maclean researched every detail of the story, compiling multiple accounts to give a broad picture.The book drags in a few parts, but overall it’s a fascinating look at the horrible event. It’s as much a story of Maclean’s research as it is a story about the men. He didn’t begin the book until he was in his 70s, which makes the deaths he writes about especially poignant. When he wrote it he’d already lived a long, full life, something that none of those men were able to do.The book looses its focus in the second half, drifting a bit into personal feelings rather than facts. Overall, I’d say if the topic interests you read it, otherwise, skip it.Side Note: The narrator of the audiobook was awful and I almost stopped reading it because of him. I learned later that it was read by Norman’s son, John Maclean, which explains a lot. It’s very rare to find an author or any other unprofessional reader that can do a good job with an audiobook. There are exceptions, like David Sedaris and Neil Gaiman, who are wonderful, but on average it doesn’t work out well.
    • 5/5
      I read somewhere that every equation or graph in a book decreases its sales by 10%. Publishers and editors take this maxim to ridiculous extremes; in one “popular economics” book I read the author described graphs (e.g., “A graph of X versus Y would look like an arch”) rather than printing them. It’s good, therefore, that the University of Chicago Press editors are made of sterner stuff, because the most moving feature of Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire is a graph.This is not to say that the text of the book isn’t moving as well. A Great Day to Fight Fire, reviewed earlier, tells the story of the men involved – how they grew up, what their lives were like, how they got to be smokejumpers. Maclean focuses instead on technical aspects – what was known about fires in 1949, how the fire might have moved and spread, and modern (for 1990, when Maclean died with the book unfinished) forest fire science. Yet, somehow, Young Men and Fire manages to be more moving and personal. Maclean made several trips to Mann Gulch – including one while the ashes were still warm, when he worked for the Forest Service himself, then several much later when he had retired from being an English Literature professor at the University of Chicago. He explored the area – which is brutal and steep and hot – even though he knew that a Forest Service fire scientist 20 years younger had died of a heart attack doing the same thing in 1949 – trying to piece together science and survivor’s narratives to make sense of what they saw on the ground.Maclean’s description of the fire basics is essentially the same as Matthews’; started by lightning, burned slowly until it got out of timber, then rapidly as it caught dried grass and moved upslope. Wag Dodge realized things were going poorly and that his crew could never outrun the fire up the slope – so he started an “escape fire” – but nobody realized what the was trying to do and bypassed him. Two of the crew made it out by climbing up a slope; the rest tried to “sidehill” away from the fire, and didn’t. Maclean persuaded the two remaining survivors to return to the scene and explain what they did, why they did it, and where they were when they did it.The survivors – Walter Rumsey and Robert Sallee – had remarkably accurate memories as they approached the rock slide they had used as a refuge. They noted – from hundreds of feet away – that the memorial cross for one of the victims (William Hellman, who survived to die of his burns the day after the fire) was in the wrong place; they remembered moving Hellman to a large flat rock to keep his burns out of the ashes, and giving him the only liquid they had to quench his thirst – the juice from a can of potatoes. They found the rock, poked around in the grass a little, and found a thirty-year-old rusty can. Trying to pick out their escape route was more problematical – although they agreed on where they had crossed the ridge they disagreed on where Dodge had lit his escape fire. Maclean, on a return trip, found the escape fire spot (still marked with a wooden cross, now fallen and covered with weeds, which Dodge had placed there when he returned to the scene) and the ridge crossing, identified by a juniper that Rumsey had tumbled into.Maclean’s prose is remarkable – you might expect a literature professor to get overly eloquent, and there are times when Maclean is eloquent – but not overly. There are some digressions – a description of Albert Abraham Michaelson’s billiard skills and the comments of a veteran Forest Service firefighter on the wartime use of Mennonite smokejumpers, for example – but they all eventually tie together.Near the end of the book, Maclean visits the Forest Service’s Fire Science lab and tries to answer some unsolved questions – why did Dodge’s escape fire burn directly up the slope while the main fire burned at right angles, up the gulch, and why was there disagreement over fire timing (the official report used 5:55 PM as the time the men died, based on the melted watch of Jim Harrison, but other recovered watches showed times from 5:42 to 6:40; a ranger down at the gulch outlet to the Missouri estimated the crew had died sometime between 5:35 and 5:45 but was persuaded to change his story to the “official” time). In 1949, the question of the “escape fire” was pretty important, because the father of one of the victims contended in a lawsuit that it was the escape fire, not the main fire, which killed the crews. Maclean’s explanation of the apparently anomalous behavior of the escape fire is that the main fire was creating its own wind, opposite to the prevailing wind direction, and Dodge was lucky enough to set his fire at a place and time where the two canceled out. In Maclean’s reconstruction the escape fire had nothing to do with the deaths – it burned upslope just enough to allow Dodge to shelter in the ashes, but was quickly surrounded and bypassed by the main fire.The fire science lab had mathematical models of how fast a fire will progress, given fuel type, wind speed, and slope angle, and also how fast men can run on a slope. That’s what the graph I mentioned is all about – time on the X-axis and distance on the Y. There are two curves – a solid one showing the distance traveled by the men, including their head start, and a dashed one showing the distance travelled by the fire. They converge at 5:55 PM.All our lives trace curves, some irregular and some purposeful. Some other curve converges with us – an advancing fire, perhaps; or the growth of a patch of cells; or the blood pressure in an artery; or the route of an automobile driven by a drunk. Sooner or later the curves touch, and our curve ends.Highly recommended.