It is a gripping yarn, though the storytelling is at times slowed by Vaillant’s wanderings. There’s a painstaking history of the use of bitumen over the millenniums ... Fire Weather lacks many memorable human characters. But Vaillant fills that void with an unforgettable protagonist: fire itself.
'It has been suggested that one reason so many of us are attracted to disaster movies … is because they offer ways to visualize, and perhaps prepare for, such events ourselves,' writes journalist John Vaillant in Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World. His book appeals for much the same reason — but the cataclysms for which it prepares us are not fictions ... It is impossible to keep reading, impossible to stop ... Fire Weather” mounts a systematic investigation into all the factors that conspired to wreak such havoc on Fort McMurray. A book about an isolated disaster thereby unfurls into a book about boreal forest ecosystems, the chemistry of combustion, the flammability of modern furniture, the history of environmental exploitation in Alberta, the climactic conditions that are making forest fires increasingly dangerous and ubiquitous, and much more — at times, too much more ... Fire Weather fails when it trades in familiar warnings, which are easily relegated to the dustbin of the mind. It succeeds when it concretizes the unimaginable in terms that seize readers by the throat.
Stunning and powerful ... Scrupulously and thoroughly researched ... Horrific ... Fire Weather is...an essential book, if not a call to arms then, at the very least a survey of where we stand.
Deeply reported ... Vaillant is a skilled longform journalist, and one senses the shape of a leaner, more agile account of perhaps 30,000 words at the heart of this hefty tome. During the most self-indulgently intellectual sections... and some of the more meandering first-person accounts, I found myself yearning for the abridged version. But, overall, the drama of the unfolding action and the righteous anger of the polemic concealed within are engrossing.
Searing ... Vaillant’s exploration of fire draws on physics and chemistry, philosophy and symbolism ... His robust and vivid writing, detailed reporting, and urgent concern for the environment make for sizzling reading.
here’s a lot of good Elizabeth Kolbert–level popular science writing here along with grittier portraits of the lives of the people who make their living among the tar sands and scrub. Vaillant, whose previous books have centered on the intersections of human and natural realms and their often tragic consequences, asks interesting questions as well ... A timely, well-written work of climate change reportage.
Gripping ... Despite some moments of overwriting, Vaillant’s exploration of this material is rich and illuminating, and his prose punchy and cinematic ... The result is an engrossing disaster tale with a potent message.
