Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout Audiobook

Quotes

• “Between tales of sweeping out rat droppings from the two-room cabin or flyfishing by moonlight or describing the environmental issues of fire suppression, former Wall Street Journal copy editor Connors deftly weaves his personal story and shares the joys of working solo five months each year as a US Forest Service wilderness lookout…Narrator Sean Runette brings Connors’ writing alive…Highly recommended for adults and older teens.”

  — Library Journal (starred audio review)

• “Narrator Sean Runnette provides a relaxed reading that emphasizes the Zen qualities of the job. The resulting audiobook should appeal to armchair rangers.”

  — AudioFile

• “Excellent, informative, and delightful.”

  — Annie Proulx, Pulitzer Prize–winning author

• “An urgent, clear, bright book; it is both lyrical enough to arrest breath and absolutely compelling, reminding us why we need fire, solitude, wilderness.”

  — Alexandra Fuller, New York Times bestselling author

• “Finely, wryly, at times poetically wrought…Connors has succeeded in weaving many stories into one…But it’s what he calls ‘the drama of the self’ that most distinguishes Fire Season—the drama inherent in a solitary existence amid ‘a landscape prone to burn,’ but also the drama of a writer alone before his typewriter finding a voice and new literary life in arid terrain.”

  — New York Times Book Review

• “A quirky meditation on the lonely pleasures of summers in a seven-by-seven-foot lookout tower in a particularly wild patch of the Southwest…A quietly moving love letter to a singular place.”

  — Los Angeles Times

• “[A] lyrical, masterly debut from a first-class writer.”

  — Men’s Journal

• “One of the most elegant ruminations about the wilderness and the rugged West to emerge in quite some time.”

  — NPR

• “Reading this book is like taking a vacation in beautiful scenery with an observant and clever guide. So relax and enjoy.”

  — Associated Press

• “What a wonderful book. Philip Connors went up to the mountaintop to serve as a lookout—and he has come down with a masterwork of close observation, deep reflection, and hard-won wisdom. This is an unforgettable reckoning with the American land.”

  — Philip Gourevitch, former editor of Paris Review

• “Connors introduces us to his wilderness in this ruminative, lyrical, occasionally suspenseful account that bristles with the narrative energy and descriptive precision of Annie Dillard and dovetails between elegiac introspection and a history of his curious and lonely occupation.”

  — Publishers Weekly

• “Connors proffers an ecological manifesto for making our peace with fire. More importantly, he offers a profound (and at times hilariously profane) perspective on the relationship between humans and the earth.”

  — BookPage

• “Wise and impassioned, Connors’ unique perspective… illuminates the joys of solitude and the complicated nature of life in a volatile, untamable environment.”

  — Booklist