Books Pick: Lookout Point

Every April, Philip Connors, a former Wall Street Journal copy editor, treks five and a half miles into the Gila Wilderness to spend five months alone (save for his dog) in one of America's last lookout towers, alerting the Forest Service to any nascent fires. His new book, "Fire Season," reviewed this week in the magazine, is the product of eight seasons of such solitary observation. "The life of a lookout," writes Connors, "is a blend of monotony, geometry, and poetry, with healthy dollops of frivolity and sloth." The job of "lookout" boasts an impressive alumni roster—Jack Kerouac, Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder, Norman Maclean—and this legacy, understandably, weighs heavily on Connors. His book, however, is a compelling study of isolation, wilderness, and, as the writer sees it, "a vocation in its twilight."