If you live in the west Wildfires are a part of life here. The author a very good job explaining why these fires are becoming more and more intense and destructive. And his answers are balanced. It’s Not just climate change, or firefighting bureaucracies, or wildfire management policies, or the expansion of building homes where they don’t belong it all of this and more.
Most of the fires that are detailed in the book took place in Colorado, so if you live here as I do, they will be very familiar.
The problems with the book are
1. No maps of any of the places where the fires took place.
2. The author is more journalist than storyteller, so much of the book reads more like a newspaper account of what happened, it tends to come across rather dry.
Still the book does explain in easy to understand descriptions what is causing these massive destructive fires, and why they will only continue to get worse. ( )

Having seen the recent movie about the deaths of these firefighters, I simply didn’t want to read the story in print as well. Regardless of the term used, wildfires are definitely larger and more destructive than ever before — and will get worse. At the moment, dealing with other environmental disasters. Each of us only has so much capacity for outrage and distress. This would exceed mine even tho it’s well-written. Perhaps I can read the whole thing later. ( )

I am a volunteer firefighter in the Colorado mountains so I found this book interesting and informative. I especially enjoyed the portions of the book dedicated to past fire fires and the fires' behavior. I was less interested in the politics and global warming side of the book. Worth the read. Two thumbs up. ( )

A must read before you build or escape to that dream cabin in the woods (or grant someone a building permit to do it). ( )

I saw this book in the library the day after my sister’s house was lost to the Wine Country fires in California and immediately snatched it up. Michael Kodas, deputy director of the Center for Environmental Journalism, addresses the subject of wildfires and why every year seems to herald increasingly large conflagrations that are continually breaking records, whether by their size, the cost of fighting them, or the number of lives lost. This is happening so frequently that a new word has been added to the lexicon to describe the phenomenon, megafires. In the past decade alone fires are increasingly threatening towns and cities. Fires destroyed hundreds of homes in Boulder an Colorado Springs in 2012 and 2013. In 2014, fires burned into Los Alamos, New Mexico and threatened material disposal areas containing plutonium at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In June of 2013, nineteen of the twenty elite wildland firefighters of the Granite Mountain Hotshots perished in a fire that threatened homes near their home base of Prescott, Arizona. In addition to the 19 Prescott firefighters, thirty other wildland firefighters perished in the time it took Kodas to write this book.

This is not just an American phenomenon, though. In 2009, 179 people died when wildfires destroyed the Australian town of Marysville. Other massive fires have burned around the globe with many threatening urban areas such as Valparaiso, Chile; Cape Town, South Africa; and Fort McMurray, in Canada.

Kodas attributes a variety of factors to this increase. First is the whole attitude that we have had about fires and the Smoky Bear philosophy that all fires must be stamped out immediately. Forests have been around for millions of years and during all that time fires have periodically burned through them, thinning them and getting rid of sick and dead trees and leaving the forests healthier because of it. One hundred years of aggressive firefighting, though, have lead to millions of square miles of forests that are overcrowded and full of deadfall and sick bug-infested trees that, when they do burn, burn with a catastrophic intensity. Add to that the modern reality that almost half of Americans are now living in what is called the Wildland Urban Interface, areas where any burns, prescribed or otherwise, would be a threat to lives and property. Kodas also makes clear without directly saying so, that climate change, or variability, as more circumspect sources would say, plays a large part in the trend. In little more than a decade the fire season has increased by over two months and some fires have continued to burn until well into the following year.

Bottom line: This book has a lot of excellent information and is very well footnoted, a relief after some other books I’ve read recently. Unfortunately, unless all of our public officials and city planners could be made to sit down and read it, I fear that this trend will continue and that, as forest service researched predict, we could see fires burning up to 20 million acres, an area the size of Maine.

FYI: On a 5-point scale I assign stars based on my assessment of what the book needs in the way of improvements:
*5 Stars – Nothing at all. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
*4 Stars – It could stand for a few tweaks here and there but it’s pretty good as it is.
*3 Stars – A solid C grade. Some serious rewriting would be needed in order for this book to be considered great or memorable.
*2 Stars – This book needs a lot of work. A good start would be to change the plot, the character development, the writing style and the ending.
*1 Star – The only thing that would improve this book is a good bonfire. ( )