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.

Searing.

here’s a lot of good Elizabeth Kolbert–level popular science writing here along with grittier portraits of the lives of the people who make their living among the tar sands and scrub. Vaillant, whose previous books have centered on the intersections of human and natural realms and their often tragic consequences, asks interesting questions as well.

Gripping.