Fire Weather Audiobook By John Vaillant cover art

Fire Weather

The Making of a Beast

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Fire Weather

By: John Vaillant
Narrated by: Alan Carlson
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#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Winner of the 2024 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing • Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction • Winner of the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize • Winner of the 2024 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize • Winner of the 2024 Lane Anderson Award • Finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction • Finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction • One of the New York Times’ Top Ten Books of The Year • Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction 

A stunning account of the colossal wildfire at Fort McMurray, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind from the award-winning, best-selling author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce.

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian • TIME • The Globe and Mail • The New Yorker • Financial Times • CBC • Smithsonian • Air Mail Weekly • Slate • NPR • Toronto Star • The Washington Post • The Times • Orion Magazine

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada's petroleum industry and America's biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.
    For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.
    With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America's oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant's urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun. Natural Disaster Climate Change Nature & Ecology Environment Environmental Natural Resources Science Anthropology Public Policy Politics & Government Outdoors & Nature
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This is a book about climate change that speaks to the unconvinced, to the people working in the Alberta oil sands who have experienced the devastating Fort McMurray fire or have been affected by it.

However, the beginning could have been more coherent. It feels like starting to read the Wikipedia article on the Fort McMurray fire but getting caught up following every link along the way: "The first gasoline engine was described on page 1 of the Scientific American, directly above a recipe for Canadian Rhubarb Wine."

Climate change for the unconvinced

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One of my favourites. Incredibly well written, I listened compulsively. Even if you have no interest in forest fires or climate change, this book is outstanding.

Astounding research and storytelling

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