Review: Maclean, River of Fire

River of Fire: The Rattlesnake Fire and the Mission Boys by John N MacLean

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is an expansion and update of a piece in Maclean's earlier book, Fire and Ashes.

Maclean is a good journalist, and his books are well-written, well-researched, thoughtful. He's not as good a writer as his father (Norman Maclean, whose Young Men and Fire is one of my top three books of all time), but almost nobody is.

This book is about the Rattlesnake Fire and how and why it killed fifteen men. Maclean is thorough and careful. He's interviewed the arsonist, the survivors, anyone who was on the fire and still alive fifty years later. He's gone out and walked the "race against fire" (which he writes about with much the same organization as Norman Maclean uses in writing about the Mann Gulch Fire, which I assume is a deliberate homage). This is a careful, respectful book, predicated on the belief that if we can understand what caused the fatalities on the Rattlesnake Fire, we can keep it from happening again.

The photographs of the landscape are good photographs, but they are labeled almost illegibly (at least for me).



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