Fire Season : Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout
Author(s): Philip Connors
“Fire Season both evokes and honors the great hermit celebrants of nature, from Dillard to Kerouac to Thoreau—and I loved it.”
—J.R. Moehringer, author of The Tender Bar
“[Connors’s] adventures in radical solitude make for profoundly absorbing, restorative reading.”
—Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air
Phillip Connors is a major new voice in American nonfiction, and his remarkable debut, Fire Season, is destined to become a modern classic. An absorbing chronicle of the days and nights of one of the last fire lookouts in the American West, Fire Season is a marvel of a book, as rugged and soulful as Matthew Crawford’s bestselling Shop Class as Soulcraft, and it immediately places Connors in the august company of Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, Barry Lopez, and others in the respected fraternity of hard-boiled nature writers.
Review(s):
“[A] lyrical, masterly debut from a first-class writer.”
“[A] finely, wryly, at times poetically wrought first book. . . . Connors has succeeded in weaving many stories into one [and has found] a voice and new literary life in arid terrain where I, for one, had suspected there was little new life to be found.”
“A fine prose stylist with a splendid eye for detail, Connors allows his readers to see the natural beauty he witnesses. . . . All lovers of nature will understand the allure and wonder that Connors so gracefully describes.”
“This is a book for all nature lovers, and more importantly, those who fail to see the beauty of the natural world. Connors’ prose is so mesmerizing, so enthralling, that even the most committed city dweller will be tempted to head for a remote, quiet destination.”
“[T]his is modern nature writing at its very finest.”
“[R]eading this book is like taking a vacation in beautiful scenery with an observant and clever guide. So relax and enjoy.”
“Compelling and introspective, Fire Season lingers like a good poem.”
“Philip Connors is the typical run-of-the-mill U.S. Forest Service employee. Except, you know, he can write like hell. . . . This book is great, like Norman-Maclean-’Young-Men-and-Fire’ great.”
“[A] compelling study of isolation, wildness, and ‘a vocation in its twilight’.”
“[A] quietly moving love letter to a singular place. By the last page, I wanted to hike up to the tower, sip some whiskey with him and just look.”
ISBN: 9780061859373