Fire Weather

April 3, 2023
Journalist Vaillant (The Tiger) offers a gripping account of the May 2016 fire that engulfed the city of Fort McMurray in the Canadian province of Alberta, destroying thousands of homes and forcing the evacuation of 88,000 people. His vivid description of the conflagration, which ignited during freakishly hot and dry weather and swept into town so suddenly that residents barely escaped in their cars as their houses flared and vaporized, is set against the Dantean backdrop of Fort McMurray’s oil-sands mining industry, one of the dirtiest outposts of the fossil fuels sector. Later chapters recap the science showing that greenhouse emissions to which the oil sands contribute are making droughts, heat waves, and wildfires more common. Vaillant’s sprawling narrative also takes in 19th-century sea otter hunts and the musings of 12th-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen, as he turns the Fort McMurray wildfire into a potent warning against the dangers of climate complacency and “unregulated free market capitalism.” Despite some moments of overwriting, Vaillant’s exploration of this material is rich and illuminating, and his prose punchy and cinematic. (“He thought he’d been hit, and he had—not by another vehicle, but by a fleeing deer, its fur smoking and aglow with embers.”) The result is an engrossing disaster tale with a potent message. Photos. Agent: Stuart Krichevsky, Stuart Krichevsky Literary.

October 1, 2023

Vaillant (The Jaguar's Children) uses Canada's 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire as a jumping-off point to discuss the history, science, and politics of climate change and the increasing flammability of the world. Alan Carlson offers a tense and heartbreaking narration of the horror visited upon McMurray's residents. Background details about the history of petroleum and Big Oil, the science of fire, and the people who work in oil-sands operations are interspersed with gripping accounts of efforts to contain or escape from the fire. Employing a newscaster-like cadence, Carlson captivates as the narrative weaves between first-person accounts, scientific data, and the author's warnings about the future. Vaillant's prose occasionally verges on being overblown, such as when he speaks of fire as a living, ravenous organism. Even so, listeners will likely be spellbound by the facts he presents, which are terrifying enough to stand alone. VERDICT A timely exploration of an increasingly frequent natural disaster. The human-centric story at the center will keep less academically oriented listeners engaged and, perhaps, pondering how close they've come to recent fires.--Matthew Galloway

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