<http://freshfiction.com/review.php?id=63348>

Have you ever really thought about fire? How dangerous it is? How scary it is? But have you thought about how helpful it can be in certain instances? There is also a beauty in fire. There is also a lot of work that goes on where fire is concerned, even with controlled burns. I live in a National Forest and every year the forestry department sets certain parts of the wood on fire. Sometimes the fires do manage to get out of control but our well trained forestry department as well as our local fire departments are trained to handle these fires. Yes they may loose more land then they intended and sometimes a house or even a neighborhood falls prey to the flames. This book will explain pretty much everything fire to. How fire is used to put out fire and so much more. It is a very interesting read.

From the start I thought the author had taken an interesting direction, explaining how wildfires can be a good thing (i.e. cleansing soils and increasing some species diversity) as well as a bad thing (i.e. the loss of historical forests, homes and lives).

The prologue really gripped me; it was very powerful and the use of photographs throughout really helped to put things into perspective at times, as well as being quite stunning.

I will say that some of the photos were awkwardly placed, breaking up the flow of the text.

I learned so much from this book. One of them being that you can tell exactly when a fire hit a particular area by analyzing the trees' "fire scars". I thought that was such an interesting concept and I loved that some people call trees "the keepers of landscape history". That title makes plenty of sense!

It's so interesting to see how one fire outbreak has a knock on effect to other species and before you know it, both flora and fauna are suffering. It's quite shocking how in one case the extent of the damage is truly diabolical, whilst in another case, it does great things for the diversity of the area.

I appreciated how much the author knew, granted it did feel a bit excessive at times, but honestly, I was never at a loss for information, plus it was written in an easy to understand way too (for the most part), so that was helpful.

Sometimes we were brought back this hypothetical scenario, that was embedded throughout, and this was helpful in picturing the life of a firefighter, but at other times it felt a little out of place.

I'd say the only real reason this didn't get a 5 star was because I wasn't always drawn to pick it back up and where it was mainly centered around America, it wasn't directly relevant to me (which is kind of good actually, because I don't want to live near wildfires!!), so I couldn't always put areas into context.

Overall, this was a really insightful, nonfiction book, that helped to shed some light on wildfires and what they can do to an area, in a short amount of time.

This book is wonderfully compelling and informative! I loved its succinct education on past, present and future fire. It is thoroughly well sourced, and I appreciate the list of further reading, too. This is nonfiction at its best, and thank you for sharing with me.