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October 3, 2007

Book du Jour: Under a Flaming Sky

Speaking of wildfires, my book of the day is Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894. It is the sharply written story of a how a Minnesota town of 1,200 was devastated by a catastrophic firestorm that came raging out of the nearby woods with tornado-class winds and a 300-foot wall of fire, killing 436 people.

Something was afoot that summer -- something concealed, not yet revealed. All across the Upper Midwest, a yellow-gray murk obscured the finer details of terrain and landscape, softening and blurring the outlines of everything one could see, and hiding much that one could not see.

The tragedy is surprisingly little-known, despite the severity and the staggering death toll, and the book chronicles the causes, impact, and after-effects in intimate detail. The result is an immediate classic of its kind, up there with Norman Maclean's heartbreaking Young Men and Fire, with Firestorm at Peshtigo, and, for true buffs, Stephen Pyne's encyclopedic Fire in America.

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