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70
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
90/100Critics
50/100Scholars
Author:
John Vaillant
Publisher:
Knopf
Date:
June 6, 2023
In May 2016, the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, burned to the ground, forcing 88,000 people to flee their homes. It was the largest evacuation ever of a city in the face of a forest fire, raising the curtain on a new age of increasingly destructive wildfires. This book is an account of one of North America's most devastating forest fires-and a stark exploration of our dawning era of climate catastrophes.
What The Reviewers Say
It is a gripping yarn, though the storytelling is at times slowed by Vaillant’s wanderings. There’s a painstaking history of the use of bitumen over the millenniums.
'It has been suggested that one reason so many of us are attracted to disaster movies … is because they offer ways to visualize, and perhaps prepare for, such events ourselves,' writes journalist John Vaillant in Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World. His book appeals for much the same reason — but the cataclysms for which it prepares us are not fictions.
Stunning and powerful.
Deeply reported.
