Fire Weather
A True Story from a Hotter World
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Fire Weather
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Narrated by:
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Alan Carlson
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By:
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John Vaillant
About this listen
*WINNER of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2023*
**AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER**
A stunning account of this century's most intense urban fire, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind.
In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores the past and the future of our ever-hotter, more flammable world.
For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture and civilization. Yet in our age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in ways never before witnessed by human beings. With masterly prose and cinematic style, Vaillant delves into the intertwined histories of the oil industry and climate science, the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern wildfires, and the lives forever changed by these disasters.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2023 John Vaillant (P)2023 Penguin AudioCritic Reviews
"In John Vaillant's vivid anatomy of the apocalyptic Fort McMurray inferno, the histories of humankind's ever-accelerating consumption of fossil fuel, and of our ever-increasing vulnerability to extreme wildfire, converge with the relentlessness of fate - and the urgency of prophecy." (Philip Gourevitch)
"Riveting, spellbinding, astounding... John Vaillant is one of the great poetic chroniclers of the natural world, and here he captures the majesty and horror of one of its great disasters - and what made it tragically possible." (David Wallace-Wells)
"By turns a propulsive account of the Fort McMurray Fire burning an oil town to ash; an investigation into the gas-guzzling economic systems that make wildfires so hot they melt steel (and so large they form their own weather); and a meditation on the human relationship with combustion. At the centre, Vaillant gives us fire itself as a character - fast, hungry, and evolving to shape the warming decades to come." (Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast)
What listeners say about Fire Weather
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Andrew Craig
- 06-12-2023
Incredible tale beautifully told
“The wilful and ongoing failure to act on climate science is unforgivable. Recriminations are justified but none will be sufficient.”
Powerful and urgent clarion call to a blind world stumbling headlong into catastrophe. As an Australian who lived through 4+ months of choking smoke in the 2019 fire season this hit home, hard. Required reading.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Martin Klumpp
- 04-12-2023
Outstanding
Insightful, informative, riveting, speaks truth to power, a must listen. So good I now need a hard copy.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Andrew
- 09-05-2024
This book is sobering
As a fire fighter I see 1st hand what John Vaillant has written about. The world needs to act now to stop the mining and use of fossil fuel. It’s not too late but it’s getting closer by the day to where it will be. This book is an excellent piece of writing that gives you background and substance of what happened and why and what we must do to reverse it continuing. The personal stories are sometimes sad but also hopeful and show the resilience of humans and our ability. We got our selves into this mess and we can get our selves out of it.
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