Fire Weather
By John Vaillant
- Genre
- History, Society & Current Affairs
- Publisher
- Alfred A. Knopf (Penguin Random House)
- Publication year
- 2023
- ISBN
- 9781524732851
Fire Weather is a work of nonfiction by the writer John Vaillant, first published in May 2023. It centers on the 2016 wildfire that devastated Fort McMurray, Alberta, and connects it to fossil fuels and climate change. It won the 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize and was a National Book Award and...
In May 2016 a wildfire overran Fort McMurray, the boomtown at the heart of Canada's oil-sands industry, forcing the fastest evacuation in modern history. John Vaillant uses that inferno as the spine of Fire Weather, a gripping account of a single catastrophe that opens into the larger story of fire, fossil fuels and a warming planet. He moves from the minute-by-minute terror of the burn to the chemistry of combustion and the history of an industry that helped create the conditions for its own undoing. Vaillant writes with a reporter's precision and a storyteller's momentum, so that even the science reads like suspense. intendle recommends it as one of the essential climate books of the decade - terrifying, lucid and impossible to dismiss. Winner of the 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer, it makes an abstract emergency viscerally, unforgettably real.