Fire

Rating:
Summary: Hot Book From a Hot Writer
Review: "Fire" is not a singular text as the cover would suggest. It is more a collection of essays, beginning with the featured story of storm jumpers. As the author explains, he began this book many years ago with the idea of stringing together a collection of stories about dangerous jobs around the world. He got sidetracked while researching one of those stories and turned it into the book "The Perfect Storm."

So, if you are searching for a sequel to "The Perfect Storm" about a band of firefighters, this isn't that book. But it is an intriguing group of essays about "hot" situations all over the world. Junger introduces fascinating characters like an old aboriginal islander who still spears giant sperm whales because he can't find a replacement for the job that provides for his fellow islanders. He also travels to war-torn Serbia and gives a haunting recount of a doomed group of hostages taken in Kashmir.

Junger is thrifty in his writing; he understands the drama in his story and gets to it. These stories read quickly and are the perfect size for a short session with a book. I also find his research to be extraordinary. Not only does he recount the important details of events, he also gives wonderful summaries of the settings, occupations or phenomena covered. For instance, I now have a fairly good understanding of how a wildfire spreads and also know what forensic details are most important to those investing deaths of firefighters.

In recent years, the genre of non-fiction writing has exploded. Along with John Krakaeur, Sebastian Junger is producing books that are both well-written and enjoyable, and what more could you want as a reader?

Rating:
Summary: Hot book from a hot writer
Review: "Fire" is not a singular text as the cover would suggest. It is more a collection of essays, beginning with the featured story of storm jumpers. As the author explains, he began this book many years ago with the idea of stringing together a series of stories about dangerous jobs around the world. He got sidetracked while researching one of those stories and turned it into the book "The Perfect Storm".
So, if you are searching for a sequel to "The Perfect Storm" about a band of firefighters, this isn't that book. But it is an intriguing group of essays about "hot" situations all over the world. Junger introduces fascinating characters like an old aboriginal islander who still spears giant sperm whales because he can't find a replacement for the job that provides for his fellow islanders. He also travels to war-torn Serbia and gives a haunting recount of a doomed group of hostages taken in Kashmir.

Junger is thrifty in his writing; he understands the drama in his story and gets to it. These stories read quickly and are the perfect size for a short session with a book. I also find his research to be extraordinary. Not only does he recount the important details of events, he also gives wonderful summaries of the settings, occupations or phenomena covered. For instance, I now have a fairly good understanding of how a wildfire spreads and also know what forensic details are most important to those investing deaths of firefighters.

In recent years, the genre of non-fiction writing has exploded. Along with John Krakaeur, Sebastian Junger is producing books that are both well-written and enjoyable, and what more could you want as a reader?



Rating:
Summary: Expecting Sugar in my Coffee and It was Salt!
Review: Having been raised in the Pacific Northwest and being around forest fires and fighters for many years, I very much looked forward to reading this book. And initially Junger delivers. But then about half way into the book we find that the author's research and writing about the fighters was done before "Perfect Storm" and there wasn't enough to fill a full book. So what we find is a transition to writing about being a reporter/correspondent in war. In his publisher's mind both are stories about working in dangerous surroundings. But that's not what the reader expects when he picks up the book. And even then Junger comes up a little short so he uses short stories from a friend and fellow writer from some of their trips to war torn parts of the world to patch together enough to make a book. My disappointment comes from expecting to have an entire book about the dangers and events of firefighting. I have hundreds of photos taken by a good friend during huge fires in Southern Oregon and Northern California a couple of years ago and know that what Junger did cover was accurately presented. There are few books about the men and women who work hard and face danger daily during the fire season. Unfortunately, this book only partially documents their challenges.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: I like the subjects of Sebastian Junger's articles. Moreso, his writing style, which is informative yet not dry; truthful yet it reads like a novel. I think the title Fire sums up all his articles. From forest fires to conflagrations from the different flashpoints of the world to the passions burning inside people doing their dangerous jobs.

Looking forward to his next collection of articles (His Vanity Fair article about the Kosovo Sex Trade is a must-read).

Rating:
Summary: Read it backwards
Review: It's tough to criticize Sebastian Junger given the fact that - as the cover blurb points out - he "risks his life to research compelling tales of danger." But the cover of this book and the campaign behind its release really softsells the reality that - with the exception of a brief 'Afterword' discussing the implications of 9/11 - 'Fire' is simply a series of cobbled together, re-released magazine articles. If you're a frequent reader of Vanity Fair or Men's Journal, a lot of this will look familar to you.

Furthermore, the book is arranged in chronological order. From an editing perspective, that makes sense. But it sells the author short. Clearly, his style has evolved and matured throughout the years. Without a doubt, the strongest pieces are at the very end - specifically, his two excellent essays about Afghanistan's "Lion of the Panjshir" Ahmad Shah Massoud. Putting "Perfect Storm" aside, these pieces are Junger's defining work and the most compelling reasons to buy and read 'Fire.'

So my advice is to read the book backwards. Go straight to "Lion in Winter" (2001) and "Massoud's Last Conquest" (2002). Then, cherry-pick working backwards, remmebering that the better writing comes later. In fact, Junger has been done a great disservice by his editors here by naming the book 'Fire' and leading with two extensive essays about forest fires in the American West. This masks the fact the the best essays in the book involve Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Kosovo.

Rating:
Summary: No Perfect Storm - Not Compelling or Well Written
Review: Just finished Fire by Sebastian Junger. Thumbsdown. I was hoping it would be as compelling as a Perfect Storm, but the book is deceptively titled. It should be:

Fire and Other Short Essays by Sebastian Junger as there's only 2 stories in the whole book about fire, the rest are about badly war torn countries.

So there's no real cohesive story in the book like a Perfect Storm, and very few of the stories are a good read.

The worst part of the book is how Junger puts the former head of the Afghan Northern Alliance on a pedistool, in several spots he makes reference to the fact that he was widely accused of atrocities, but then dismisses it casually. It's a clear case of a reporter liking his subject too much to be objective. All in all a major disappointment!

Rating:
Summary: More fascination with danger from Sebastian Junger
Review: Let's face facts, there was no way Sebastian Junger could follow up "The Perfect Storm" with a book length tale as compelling as "Storm" was. Nontheless, "Fire" is often compelling, sometims educational, and rarely boring.

The book is essentially a collection of magazine articles written by Junger, but they demonstrate several things: Junger is truly fascinated by dangerous occupations and dangerous lives, he has a wonderful way with words, and he has a knack for finding interesting stories to tell.

My favorite section in the book was on Cypress. I felt like an uneducated idiot because I have been completely oblivious to what is happening there and never realized that Cypress was such a potential flashpoint for war between Turkey and Greece. I also enjoyed his story on Afghanistan's "Lion of the Panjshir": Ahmad Shah Massoud.

Probably the least interesting story was the one on whale hunting, not because I was offended that anyone would still hunt whales (Greenpeace probably hates Junger for this story), but because I really felt no sympathy for the way of life that was dying out. I almost get the feeling Junger had mixed emotions about how to portray thw whale hunter and his protege. Close behind the whale hunter story as being the least interesting are, oddly, the two stories on fire fighting. This may seem strange given the title of the book, but these also were written earlier in his career and you can really observe his growth as a writer by reading the book from beginning to end.

Still even what one might consider to be his worst work is leagues ahead of so many other writiers. Its kind of a disservice to point out that any parts fo the book are weaker than the others simply because it all is so well written.

While not nearly as detailed and enthralling as "The Perfect Storm," this book demonstrates the wealth of writing talent possessed by Junger. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Awesome Book
Review: Ok so maybe the title was a bit misleading, but hey there were some really cool chapters in this book. Sebastian Junger is an excellent author and provides beautiful insight into places that some people may never see. I am not what you would call an avid reader. If it doesnt have pictures I probably won't pick it up. But Sebastian Junger's informative yet wildly fascinating anecdotes capture my imagination. When reading this book, I barely noticed the fact that I was learning and reading at the same time. I roared through this book at a speed-addict pace, and that is saying alot considering it takes me months to get through most books. All in all, it was an enjoyable read, and even though you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, the flames are quite eye catching.

Rating:
Summary: Solid journalism
Review: Sebastian Junger's book "Fire" is getting a lot of attention these days becasue of Junger's visit to Afghanistan in November 2000, and his visit with the military leader of the Northern Alliance, who has since been assassinated. This section, however, is only one chapter in a book that is a collection of diverse stories ranging from reportage on Western U.S. wildfires to the battlefields of Kosovo and Sierra Leonne. Junger is a good reporter and an excellent writer who knows how to make his stories come alive for the reader. He originally conceived a book in which he would report on the most dangerous jobs in the world, hence the first two chapters on Western firefighters and the third on a traditional whale hunter. Junger then discovered he had a knack as a foreign correspondent and ventured into some of the world's war zones. With all of his stories, Junger provides valuable insight for the reader, especially in his reporting on the long standing division of Cyprus, which he co-authored with another journalist.

The only drawback is that Junger's pieces are the original magazine articles and are not expanded upon for the book. The focus of each article also tends to be very narrow, especially in the foreign pieces. Junger lacks the depth of master correspondent like Thomas Friedman, and the book is fairly slight at just over 220 pages. Nevertheless, he is a skilled writer, and this makes for excellent and informative reading.

Rating:
Summary: Review of Sebastian Junger's Fire
Review: Sebastian Junger's fascination with dangerous lines of work and "people confronting situations that could easily destroy them" (Fire, xvii) brought him wide fame and notoriety with the story of the Gloucester swordfishing boat, the Andrea Gail, in magazine articles and then The Perfect Storm, his bestselling first book. However, his desire to find people in these situations (and, in a sense, an attempt to describe his own reasons for being in those situations) is the underlying theme of his new book, a collection of excellent magazine articles and other short works called Fire.

Coincidentally so is the name of the first piece, an essay about forest firefighting in general and the efforts at the Flicker Creek fire, one of many non-descript fires Mr. Junger covered, in 1992. It's a particularly good piece about the hazards of fighting forest fires, the techniques and terminology used, some history, and most of all the various groups of people that do the actual fighting. One of Mr. Junger's first articles (though there is no credit as to where it was published, if anywhere), "Fire" serves as a nice introduction, thematically and stylistically, for the rest of the book.

Another article deals with the fire at Storm King Mountain, which killed twelve firefighters in 1994 and is very similarly themed. Following that is the bulk of the book, a series of articles concerning war and conflict in all its misery; Mr. Junger covers the Kashmir, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Cyprus, and finally, in two very telling pieces, Afghanistan (before and after September 11, 2001). Interspersed are two articles, one dealing with one of the last Caribbean whale hunters (which doesn't sound particularly dangerous these days but remember the story of the ramming and destruction of the whaleship Essex and the novel it inspired, Moby Dick) and John Colter, an early 19th century fur trapper/frontiersmen and the quest for, lacking a better term, adventure.

Mr. Junger engages the reader in an easy yet realistic prose that is absorbable and mesmerizing at the same time. Occasionally, given similar subject matter (the two articles on forest firefighters and Afghanistan, for instance) he unintentionally repeats himself, which can be annoying, but cannot be helped.

However, each of the articles tell their own unique, wrapped story that leaves the reader wanting to more, wanting to know what happened after the writing stopped. Some, like "Escape from Kashmir" end in a lucky escape attempt and mystery, while others, like "The Terror of Sierra Leone" and "Dispatches from a Dead War," end in everlasting misery of unending conflict and hatred.

In the end, Mr. Junger's search for dangerous situations and occupations puts him in the very same situations, acting for the most part as a war correspondent and writer. Sometimes it just makes one wish they'd never encountered it, such as Mr. Junger's vivid description of coming under a Taliban artillery bombardment on an Afghani hilltop: "There was nothing exciting about it, nothing even abstractly interesting. It was purely, exclusively bad." (Fire, 207)

Yet Mr. Junger returned; in late 2001 he followed the fighters of the Northern Alliance as they attacked and swept through the Taliban, into Kabul. Why? Mr. Junger never says, though the excuse that it was a job was probably valid. However, it could be that he probably would not want to be anywhere else - and that, beyond any other motive, is really the sole truth behind the men and women of Fire.