Fire

Giving this book the title, “Fire”, is an advertising ploy on the part of its publishers. Only the first two essays of this series, all published first elsewhere, are about Wildfire; the remaining 168 of its 224 pages deal with wide-ranging topics around the world, mainly involving war in all its gory manifestations. The term ‘adrenalin junkie’ seems to have been coined to describe Junger. His book-cover photos reveal an ultra fit wiry frame and a square-jawed face with piercing eyes. Another term once used to describe the author of Source of the Nile, Christopher Ondaatje, would be alpha male. The term fits.

 

Whether the average reader is interested in the science of fire is debatable but it’s sprinkled liberally in these 56 pages. No one could accuse Sebastian Junger of being simply a voyeur though his assignments manage to take him to the world’s least desirable vacation spots. One has to be just a little bit suicidal to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft but to do so into a potentially life-threatening wildfire would seem doubly so. Having read Junger’s War one would come to the conclusion that the man lives for danger. To willingly go to the places he has been and get so close to the action one must either be crazy or value life so little that throwing it away for the sake of a story makes sense. His photographic partner Chris Etherington died reporting on the situation in Libya making Restrepo his final opus.