Shelf Indulgence Book Club

Adult Program

Join as we discuss Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant (details below)

A limited quantity of physical copies are available at the library circulation desk one month before. An e-book copy is available in Libby. Please register by 1:00PM Tuesday so I can prepare the seating, send discussion questions in advance and send a Zoom link in case you decide to attend virtually.  This is a hybrid event - attend in person or virtually via Zoom. You must have a valid email address to use Zoom.
 

Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant

A stunning account of a colossal wildfire that collided with a city and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind.

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil 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.

Fire has been a partner in our evolution for millennia, 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 that modern forest fires wreak, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. His urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.