Young Men and Fire [B0931]

1992 HCDJ in excellent condition. On August 5, 1949, a crew of fifteen 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 forty years, Norman Maclean puts back together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy. Young Men and Fire won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992. "A magnificent drama of writing, a tragedy that pays tribute to the dead and offers rescue to the living.... Maclean's search for the truth, which becomes an exploration of his own mortality, is more compelling even than his journey into the heart of the fire. His description of the conflagration terrifies, but it is his battle with words, his effort to turn the story of the 13 men into tragedy that makes this book a classic."-from New York Times Book Review.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "A deep dive into a tragedy that forever changed wildland firefighting and how we understand how forest fires function. I had been meaning to read this one for years but never got around it, but I'm glad I finally did it as this is an amazing deep dive into the fire and the drive of smokejumpers and wildland firefighters as a whole. But this is a book that is based off the authors unfinished manuscript he wrote prior to his death it can be a little rough to read and hard to follow, so readers beware and know what you are getting yourself into."; "On the surface, a very engaging, eloquent journey to pay tribute to young lives lost while deployed to fight a seemingly routine forest fire. But what Maclean, who was also a young forest ranger and firefighter, also seems to be getting at is why do forces of nature and the universe sometimes conspire to take life. Why was he allowed to live a long and productive life while these young men were not? Maclean doesn't get his likely unknowable answer, but he certainly gives it a good try."