Customer Reviews

SMOKEJUMPERS

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This is the worst book I have read on the subject of forest firefighters. I have read several very good books on the subject, and this is not one of them. Let me go over why:

Essentially, this is a hack book written for the mass market. As such, don't expect an accurate portrayal of forest firefighters, but rather a sensational one on the same level as the movie "Firestorm". The author normally writes military books and, apparently because of this, he felt the need to redefine everything here in military terms, and portrays smokejumpers and other firefighters as if they are some kind of branch of the rangers or special forces. Despite the fact that forest firefighting has nothing to do with militarism, hardly a page goes by where he doesn't make some reference or comparison to the military. I found this distracting and it made me wonder whether the author even cared about the subject matter or whether he just wished he was writing another book on green beret snipers.

Secondly, the title is misleading. The book is an account, based on strung-together anecdotes apparently gleaned from interviews, of the Storm King Mountain fire in Colorado (1994). It includes material about smokejumpers but also about hotshots, air tankers, suburban structural firefighters, etc. Only about 50%, if that, of the content is about smokejumpers.

Third - and I found this especially annoying - the author could not resist using the pages of this book to grind his particular political axes. One of the worst examples of this can be found on pages 33-35. Veering off into a Rush Limbaugh-derived hate rant has nothing whatever to do with forest firefighters (nor with the opinions prevalently held by them) and made me wonder just why he included it.

Some great books on forest firefighters are Stephen Pyne's _Fire on the Rim_ (and anything else by Pyne), Stan Cohen's _A Pictoral History of Smokejumping_, and Peter Leschack's _Hellroaring_. Buy any one of these instead of this dud, and you can't go wrong.