Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

For nearly a decade, Connors spent half the year in a 7-foot x 7-foot tower, 10,000 feet above sea level in remote New Mexico, keeping watch over the Gila National Forest, one of the most fire-prone areas in the country. Fire Season is his remarkable reflection on work, man's place in the wild, and the charms of solitude. n nFire Season both evokes and honors the great hermit celebrants of nature, from Dillard to Kerouac to Thoreau--and I loved it. n--J.R. Moehringer, author of The Tender Barn n Connors's] adventures in radical solitude make for profoundly absorbing, restorative reading. n--Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Airn nPhillip 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. nn