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Young Men and Fire

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Young Men and Fire

By: Norman Maclean
Narrated by: Corey M. Snow
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About this listen

On August 5, 1949, a crew of 15 of the United States 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 these men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for 40 years, Norman Maclean puts back together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy.

©1972 The University of Chicago (P)2017 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Authors Freedom & Security State & Local United States

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OK read

The first half of the book is a great well told story. The second half is a bit of a ramble.

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Can anyone escape the coming conflagration?

Young Men and Fire

By Norman MacLean

It could have been a short book about a horrible tragedy however Norman McLean spins the tale of the smokejumpers within his own investigation of the event nearly 30 years later.

The way that he crafts a sentence catches you up into the scene as though you are with him; tracking down the surviving two men, his return visits to the Gulch and then his pursuit to calculate the distance, time and topography of the last hour of their lives.

I really wish that I’d had a scratch map of the Rescue and Mann Gulches to help me understand the calculations.

Human-induced climate change has seen an increase in drought and temperatures which has increased the severity, duration and intensity of wilderness fires in the last half decade. Think of the overlap of Australia’s Black Summer of 2019/20, Canada’s 2021 & 2023 extended seasons, Portugal in 2017 & 2023, Greece in 2021 & 2023, Algeria in 2021, Turkey in 2021 & 2023, Maui in 2023 and the multiple complex West Coast fires in the USA.

We can no longer help each other for long, from country to country, with fire personnel and fire aircraft as our seasons extend and overlap by months not weeks. Megafires are incinerating whole ecosystems and towns with impunity because of increased global temperatures. It is up to us to change the narrative so that mankind does not find itself trapped trying to outrun fatal consequences of our own lack of economic sacrifice and greed.












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