On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and timber in the blink of an eye. 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.

Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force. Equally dramatic is the larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and 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. The robber barons fought Roosevelt and Pinchot's rangers, but the Big Burn saved the forests even as it destroyed them: the heroism shown by the rangers turned public opinion permanently in their favor and became the creation myth that drove the Forest Service, with consequences still felt in the way our national lands are protected  ?  or not ?  today.

The Great Fire of 1910, which burned through Washington, Idaho, and Montana, was a pivotal event in American history. It galvanized the nascent conservation movement that President Teddy Roosevelt championed, made a national figure out of Gifford Pinchot and saved his newly created U.S. Forest Service, and led to both legislative and social changes in the country. Robertson Dean performs admirably and is a good match for the text. He uses his baritone to create a sense of urgency and alarm when the fire is raging, then switches to a more sober tone when reading the narrative. His characters are decidedly low-key, and he lets the text speak for Roosevelt, rather than attempting to give voice to the voluble president. R.I.G. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

 

Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author of five books, most recently The Worst Hard Time, which won a National Book Award for nonfiction and was named a New York Times Editors' Choice, a New York Times Notable Book, a Washington State Book Award winner, and a Book Sense Book of the Year Honor Book. Egan writes a weekly column, "Outposts," for the New York Times.

The Big Burn by Timothy Egan
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