Thirteen men dropped out of a small airplane to battle a raging forest fire to stop the blazing flames from swallowing their park and preserve hole. They thought they would only be fighting the fire from turning the waist high grass into black charred ashes. They never thought they’d end up fighting to keep their own lives from being devoured into the tremendous scorching flames.

‘Young Men and Fire’ written by Norman Maclean is a true story of the Mann Gulch Fire. The story hit home for woodsman and Western Rocky Mountain Montana resident Norman. Before beginning his writing career he worked for the logging camps and the United States Forest Service for many years.

Norman, also the writer of ‘A River Runs Through It,’ followed the Mann Gulch fire for many years doing not only research but also interviews, surveying the historical site of Mann Gulch, and conducting tests for his own theories of what happened in the fire. His research and curiosity of the fire spanned over three years and took him up to his final breath to write the book.

The book is separated into three sections. The first is called Ghost. It’s the most confusing part of the book and hard to follow along with. I had to go back and reread this part over at least five times. It jumped from him seeing the Mann Gulch fire to him in a fire to him being pushed down the hill by a ghost and ending up at a cabin. It makes your head spin around from trying to keep up and piece together what is actually happening. There’s a good chunk of that part that no matter how many times you pour over his words, you won’t figure out what is going on.

The second section makes up the majority of the book. It is less confusing and actually interesting for a while. I found that the amount of detail it went into interesting at first but after about fifty or more pages of minute of minute detail, I got sick of it. It starts at the thirteen fire jumpers flying over the Mann Gulch area getting the layout of the fire. It continues on the details of what they are looking for, how they prepare, and the technique of jumping out of the plane. That was really intriguing. From there it covers them eating, digging the dirt path, and every other little detail up until the big blow up of the fire.

The part that made that section hard to continue reading was that it recovered everything. I felt like I was rereading section in great detail again and again just from one other person’s point of view that wasn’t very different from the others. Maclean reiterated himself in this chapter tremendously. It got annoying quick.

The last section was all about the research Norman conducted and how he went about it. It was over three years of in-depth detail about his theories, conversations, and visits to Mann Gulch. This part was interesting at times but when he started tracing his steps from every victim’s grave to figure out if they were correctly placed it got boring.

The one downfall to this story that I feel really affect it was that Norman died before it was actually printed. Other people were responsible for conducting the final stages of face checking, grammar, and making sure the story made sense. They did not change much of the book because they wanted it to remain true to his purpose of writing it that I feel probably made some of the reading confusions. This especially was a downfall because Norman inserted his self into the story so what he was think that wasn’t clear yet was hard to figure out.

In my opinion this book was terrible and hard to read. It did have a few sections that made it worthwhile but it wasn’t worth 301 pages it took to get there. If you love history and detailed writing, you’d love this book. If you don’t, I wouldn’t recommend wasting your time reading it.

 

 



9 Responses to “Book Review: Young Men and Fire”

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    I’m glad you stuck with it, Amber. Even if it didn’t work out, I
    think reading challenging texts has its advantages. If nothing
    else, it can help you in your own writing. This covers all
    elements of the assignment, but you did need to proofread.

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