' Young Men and Fire is a somber and poetic retelling of a tragic event. Don't hesitate to take the plunge.'-Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post Book World Just as the reader of Moby Dick comes to comprehend the monstrous entirety of the great white whale, so the reader of Young Men and Fire goes into the heart of the great red fire and comes out thoroughly informed. ' Young Men and Fire is redolent of Melville. A dark American idyll of which the language can be proud.'-Robert M. Maclean's last book will stir your heart and haunt your memory.'-Timothy Foote, USA Today In compelling language, both homely and elegant, Young Men and Fire miraculously combines a fascinating primer on fires and firefighting, a powerful, breathtakingly real reconstruction of a tragedy, and a meditation on writing, grief and human character. 'A treasure: part detective story, part western, part tragedy, part elegy and wholly eloquent ghost story in which the dead and the living join ranks cheerfully, if sometimes eerily, in a search for truth and the rest it brings.'-Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune

His description of the conflagration terrifies, but it is his battle with words, his effort to turn the story of the 13 men into tragedy that makes this book a classic.'-from New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, Best Books of 1992

Maclean's search for the truth, which becomes an exploration of his own mortality, is more compelling even than his journey into the heart of the fire. 'A magnificent drama of writing, a tragedy that pays tribute to the dead and offers rescue to the living. Young Men and Fire won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992. Haunted by these deaths for forty years, Norman Maclean puts back together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned. On August 5, 1949, a crew of fifteen of the United States Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness.

Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean