Working Fire: The Making of a Fireman

by Zac Unger

Zac Unger didn’t feel like much of a fireman at first. Most of his fellow recruits seemed to have planned for the job all their lives; he was an Ivy League grad responding to an ad at a bus stop. He couldn’t keep his boots shined, and he looked terrible in his uniform. Working Fire is the story of how, from this unlikely beginning, Zac Unger came to feel at home among this close-knit tribe, came to master his work’s demands, and came to know what it is to see the world through a firefighter’s eyes. From the raw material of his days’ work—alarm calls both harrowing and hilarious, moments of triumph and grief—Unger has forged a timeless story of finding one’s path, and a rousing adventure about the bravery and sacrifice of everyday heroes.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Fire Services, Firefighters, Adult, Book Club

262 pages, Paperback

First published March 8, 2004

Reviews

[Ann Schaffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since my husband is a firefighter, I've read quite a few books on the subject. I mostly read them because I find they're all over the house; they wouldn't normally be my first choice. Compared to other firefighting books, this is 5 stars. Working Fire stands out because it reads like it was written by an honest to God paycheck-earning author, not just a firefighter who has some good stories to tell. I can't remember the last time I read a book that is this well written. The author IS a firefighter though. I'm sure of it because of the accuracy in his descriptions of the daily life, mindset, and language. I mean, sometimes I turned to my husband, and we laughed at how spot on he was. His descriptions are refreshing, thoughtful, and often funny. I'd like to meet Zac. Clever!

[Liralen · Rating 4 out of 5]

He crosses himself, then kisses his wedding ring, and I make a mental note to develop a ritual for myself, some sort of secular facsimile of prayer that I can use before I go running into a burning building. (2)

Firefighters are like astronauts or medical doctors to me—I'm never going to be one, and that's just dandy, but in the meantime I'll happily read a whole bunch about them.

Now, as the subtitle suggests, Unger didn't expect to be a firefighter. He grew up California-crunchy, went to Deep Springs* and Brown for undergrad, went to UC Berkeley for a master's degree, comes from a family of white-collar workers. On his graduation day, when he becomes a firefighter, he says of his parents that The closest they'd ever come to a group of men with badges was the time a troop of National Guardsmen with batons and tear gas had run them out of People's Park in Berkeley (58). Still, despite his comments about how much his mother must worry, it was she who set him on the path, recognising that he really didn't want to be tied to the desk job that he was heading towards.

Is Unger really so different than his contemporaries? Probably not. Differences in background, yes, but as he tells it, he basically fit in fine. His reservations ease over time; he acclimates to the banter and the reality that firefighting is at least 75% non-fire-related duties. But he spins a good story: from the training period to his first fire to later, big ones when he is more fully trained, he gives a great sense of both the overarching situation and what he was going through and learning. I loved the way he depicts the more senior firefighters: constantly ribbing on each other, jockeying for the 'best' positions (most danger, most glory)—and then, when thwarted, immediately making a teachable moment out of it.

There's not a lot of 'obvious' research (i.e., no fact-dumping, etc.), but enough background to lend credibility. (Also to teach this reader random things: did you know that the 'four criteria for immediate determination of death in the field' are decapitation, obviously protruding heart or brain, decomposition, and total incineration (page 189)? I didn't.) Sometimes it feels as though he analyses his motives/actions a bit much (sometimes a snappy comeback is just a snappy comeback), and I did conclude that wilderness firefighting interests me considerably more than city firefighting...but what can you do. Didn't make me any less excited to read Fighting Fire. (More firefighting! Female! Lesbian! Don't tell me it's too good to be true.)

*Deep Springs is a two-year college in rural California. It only has 26 students and is all male and is one of the very few reasons I have ever wanted to be male (though Wikipedia tells me that it's supposed to start accepting women soon). I might have rounded this book up from 3.5 stars just because I am so fascinated by the idea of Deep Springs (which is mentioned only in the author bio). Unfortunately, a couple searches didn't turn up any readily accessible books about it.

[Einar Jensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

In two weeks I’ll mark 25 years in the fire service. I started as a firefighter, had a stint as a fire inspector, and now serve proudly as a risk reduction specialist and infrequent public information officer. I’m glad I read Zac Unger’s engaging memoir Working Fire: The Making of an Accidental Fireman at this point of my life. He gets it and puts into words much of what I believe and feel. I’ve never worked 24- or 48-hour shifts for urban fire departments, but his perspective certainly resonates with me: “The truth is that the fires always go out, that with us or without us, they’ll never burn forever. The only question is how much of ourselves we will leave there on that day as an exchange, as the price for the fire’s going out sooner rather than later. Every fire takes a toll, every fire diminishes the men and women who fight it, men and women who’ve made the choice.” Responding to emergencies, a term defined by the caller rather than the responder, diminishes but it also nurtures those of us who enjoy taking care of people.

When he wrote this wonderful book, Unger had been a firefighter for Oakland (CA) FD for five years. He had become a paramedic and specialized in water rescue. Like all firefighters, he responds to myriad incidents: wildfires, block-razing structure fire, shootings, cardiac arrests. My favorite chapter—Blood Pressure—focused on his medical training and responses. I also like how he integrated gender, ethnicity, age, background, and other differences into the book.

I appreciate his writing style and how he shares what he’s learned about himself: “In the beginning of my career, I had thought that fire fighting was about a thing, about getting mastery over an inanimate process. But the truth I know now is that my job is unambiguously about people, about the complexity of the human spirit. Fire fighting is not about fire. It’s about the save. It’s about keeping the flames from licking too deeply into a vulnerable life and wreaking havoc there.” (That’s what risk reduction is about, too, and why I love it.) Unger integrates his sense of humor, referring to CPR as “ritual flogging of the dead,” for example, masterfully. He shares interactions with coworkers that capture their personalities fairly and respectfully without painting them as gods or titans or monsters. Unger shares good stories from the street, the station, and home as well as mistakes because, as his academy instructor said, everybody screws up; it’s about how you recover.

Unger wasn’t born to be a firefighter; he responded to an advertisement at a bus stop and found himself a new, natural home in the fire service. This book allows you to walk with him as he retraces those steps. I recommend the read and the walk.

[Richie Partington · Rating 5 out of 5]

18 December 2004 WORKING FIRE: THE MAKING OF AN ACCIDENTAL FIREMAN by Zac Unger, The Penguin Press, March 2004, ISBN: 1-59420-001-7

"It was once upon a place sometimes I listen to myself
Gonna come in first place
People on their way to work say baby what did you expect
Gonna burst into flame"
--Talking Heads, "Burning Down the House"

"Sitting on the hillside, I half hoped we'd get a good fire to play with that day. It's bad form to hope for a fire, but we can't help it; fire is what we look forward to. A fire means that somebody is in danger and may lose his or her life or health. A fire means that we're putting ourselves at risk, that one of us may get dragged away to the hospital with a broken ankle or smoke inhalation or something worse. Fires are categorically a bad thing, and we wish for them every day."

Despite having fond childhood memories of visiting the Hamptons for lazy weeks of hot beach weather, it was a radically new experience to spend the winter out there in my own little beach cottage on the sheltered Peconic Bay. The combination of constant tides and freezing temperatures results in the steady build-up of enormous, untidy piles of ice near the shore. Wandering out onto the "iceburgs" is good, clean winter fun--as long as you don't go too far out onto thin ice.

Those colder months also frequently bring screaming winds that tear across the Bay. It's nice to have a wood stove for keeping warm as those winds seek to penetrate into the cottage's every little seam and crevice.

"It's getting hot in here" --Nelly

The wind was literally screaming that night, and I had packed the stove full of oak before retiring. But it was feeling way too hot in the bedroom when I suddenly woke up and crawled out of bed, hardly able to breathe. Decades later I can still recall stumbling into the main room, seeing the paneled wall behind the stove fully engulfed in flames, screaming anxiously for my dog, Slider, who was asleep in the little upstairs room, and running barefoot across frozen grass, rocks, and sand to my parents' house to phone the North Sea volunteer fire department.

"Being lost in a fire is nothing like being lost in the woods. There is no almost lost, no almost found. Just lost. Completely and utterly lost. And getting lost in a burning building happens immediately. I've been lost in the forest, and it's a gradual process, a state of mind that you can allow yourself to slip into for a while. There's always a feeling of I think I recognize that tree or I'm pretty sure I'm moving in the right direction. A smoky room, by contrast, is entirely featureless.
"I could tell that nobody had found the seat of the flames yet, because the heat kept getting worse. My regulator said that I had a thousand pounds of air left, about a quarter of my tank, five or ten minutes if I could breathe slowly."

The privileged son of a psychiatrist and a teacher, Zac Unger grew up in a nice neighborhood between Oakland and Bezerkley. He'd graduated from an elite Oakland prep school, earned degrees at Brown and Cal, and had spent time on the coast observing the mating habits of elephant seals, as well as in a mountainous national park counting peregrine falcons. Zac was still trying to figure out what he'd do when he "grew up" when he spotted the advertisement on the back of a bus bench that eventually led him to months at the academy where he trained to be an Oakland fireman.

"I'm not quite sure why we spend so much time washing the fire engine; everybody always asks. I've owned a red pickup since I was sixteen,and it's never had a wash. Except once when another firefighter wet it down behind my back in the firehouse parking lot because he couldn't stand to look at it anymore. I've alway figured a car is just a way to get from place to place, and as long as it runs, I don't much care what it looks like. But washing the fire engine is the most archetypal 'fireman' thing we do. It's what everyone associates us with. That and grocery shopping. And carrying babies down ladders."

The reality of Zac's work is actually quite different from those archetypes. The majority of the time when Zac and his brother and sister firefighters go screeching out of the firehouse the call does not involve a building on fire. WORKING FIRE is a fascinating and lively expose into the world and work of today's professional urban firefighter. Zac's paramedic skills are constantly put to the test. And for a first responder in a city, survival can as easily involve escaping shootouts and drunken brawls as it can mean not getting lost in a burning building.

"Heroin overdose is an easy one. I put a short tube in his mouth, just long enough to tickle the back of his throat and deliver some oxygen. One injection of Narcan to his shoulder, and then there was nothing to do but use the ventilator bag to breathe for him and wait. Narcan goes straight to the chemical receptors where heroin is received and blocks them out. True to form for resuscitated junkies, in about two minutes our playboy started waking up, gagging on the tube, and cussing us out for stealing his high. Another satisfied customer."

"Almost ablaze still you don't feel the heat
It takes all you got just to stay on the beat.
You say it's a livin', we all gotta eat
But you're here alone, there's no one to compete.
If Mercy's a bus'ness, I wish it for you
More than just ashes when your dreams come true."
--Grateful Dead, "Fire on the Mountain"

But besides the well-chosen anecdotes that illuminate the dangerous and sometimes deadly calls to fires, accidents, and unplugged TVs, WORKING FIRE is also a look at the stories and colorful personalities of the boys and girls who grow up to become firemen. From the brilliant veteran who refuses to retreat to a well-earned easy assignment in a hillside station, to the great and not-so-great firehouse cooks, to those who don't make the cut at the academy, we meet real characters who are frequently worthy of a starring role in someone's contemporary novel.

Unger--whose intellectual pedigree made him a breed rather different from the typical fire department recruit--has found his place among the 42,000-pound, shining red machines that go screaming down the road to answer the call. WORKING FIRE is a thoroughly engaging book for all of us who stop in our tracks to watch those engines and trucks go roaring by.

"When the rig is gleaming clean and you step off while snugging your helmet onto your head as you kick the ax up smoothly and slip it down into its spot on your hip like a gunslinger. It's all worth it then--the dead guy in the hallway that morning, the petty hassles with admin, the pain in your back that seems to be there every day now. Because you're a fireman, the closest thing there is in this world to being a superhero."

Richie Partington, MLIS
Richie's Picks http://richiespicks.pbworks.com
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richiepartington@gmail.com

[Leo Goossen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book fighting fire: The making of a Fireman By Zac Unger was very interesting and never once did I find it to be boring or bland. I loved how the book used a lot of imagery so that the reader almost felt as if the experience was for real, and could really depict what was going on. I also loved how action packed the book was, with the narrator always attending to a big fire, or an emergency call in nearly every chapter. What I disliked about the book was the repetition of the narrator explaining why he wanted to be a firefighter and what he has to do. He does this multiple times from the start to the beginning and after a while it gets a bit boring. What also stood out to me was when in chapter 15, the narrator reveals that a well known firefighter that he knew was killed in a fire. What amazed me was how the narrator was able to make me feel sympathy for the firefighter who was killed because of how he described him. Some parts that confused me was when at a fire the narrator would use all of these different machinery that I had no idea what they were or what they were used for.

This book really answers the question of what does it mean to be an American? In the book the narrator always describes why he chose the job and what it means to serve the public. For example in Chapter 15, the narrator describes, "I made a deal when I took this job. I swore an oath to the citizens of Oakland. We're always careful; suicide is not heroic. But the essence of my job will never change. My life for theirs, my health for their safety." This shows what does it mean it be an American because he serves and protects the people of his community. He puts everyone else before himself which shows he is a true American.

A quote that supports my book review is in chapter 16, "When a firefighter dies, it doesn't matter what city he worked for, just that he did the work we all do, took the same risks, kissed his sleeping wife good-bye in the morning, and never let himself think for a second that it would be the last time he'd ever do it." This shows what sacrifices firefighters have to make and what it takes to be a firefighter.

I would recommend this book to high schoolers because it is a fun read and also very action packed and interesting. I also recommend it to high schoolers because if anyone is considering a job as a firefighter it would be a good read because it explains and portrays what the life of a firefighter really is like.

[Laurie Knapp · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author made himself and his colleagues out to be unlikable and it was hard to lose that stigma even in their redeeming or heroic moments. Early on, Unger painted himself as an elitist who was a fish out of water in the firehouse and ashamed of doing a job that was beneath him, so it was hard to later accept his credibility as a fire fighter.

Thought he may have set out to portray the raw reality of fire department life, it came off more heartless than heroic. It was hard to read about a fire fighter joking as he held up a victims’s burned-to-death dog. Much of the book lamented the boredom of quiet nights and celebrated disaster and tragedy because it provided a rush for the firefighters. Hard to imagine firemen cheering with excitement because someone’s life is going up in flames, but as Unger says somewhat apologetically, that’s just how fire department culture is.

Unger did try to balance that tone with some reflection on the dedication of his compatriots and the ultimate mission to save peoples lives, but it just wasn’t enough to make me forget the bad taste he had previously left in my mouth.

From an editorial standpoint the book was also very disjointed and hard to follow. Chapters in the end which introduced concepts about fire fighting should have been in the beginning. It was anecdotal but there was no clear path to tie one scene to another. I was surprised to see him thank a number of editors in the acknowledgments because it seemed as if it had lacked any.

[Bill Sleeman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at one person’s career path as a firefighter. There are some LOL moments and some very sad, poignant moments. Author Zac Unger does a very good job confronting both his parents' expectations for him (and how, being a firefighter WAS not the plan) with particular attention to his mother’s fears and excitement that her son has found his path. Unger spends a little time, but not a lot, exploring what it means to be a Jewish firefighter, but the greatest focus is on just being a good firefighter. With a firefighter in my own family, I especially appreciated the insight into how Unger and his fellow firefighters dealt with the danger and why they feel that their work is a calling. Unger makes a great deal of how he and his colleagues are ‘blue collar types’ but as this work illustrates – the volume of knowledge each firefighter is required to have along with the constant training and the work ethic – they are as ‘professional’ as any white-collar worker I have ever met, and certainly more important.

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

My uncle was a fireman. I know several firemen. Once, our house was on fire and the whole crew came and saved it, even though it was considered 49% destroyed by the insurance company. As part of the general public I thought I mostly knew what fire fighting was about. We see it all the time on the local news, right? This is a great behind the scenes look at Zac Unger's first three years as a fireman, including his time at the academy. His wry sense of humor and honest emotion make this into an adventure tale about the actual men who do the job and why they do it. (I was surprised at the number of NON fire fighting runs they take with their engines.) If you enjoy true life exploits, you would like this book!

[jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not sure why this got a 3.9... I found this book (Zac's story) very enlightening, entertaining, and well balanced in the sense of the honesty it conveyed about the job and calling of firefighting. Great story well told!

[Paul S · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book that peels back the curtain a bit on what it’s like to be a firefighter. The author looks at the parts the public doesn’t see and does a good job of sharing the good, the bad and the ugly sides of being a firefighter. Good read!

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Solid read.

Solid read. I was lucky to have a chance to serve a city for almost 5 years. It took me back and made me miss it even more

[Loren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zac Unger grew up in Oakland, California with a desire to rescue people. He channeled that into scuba diving and studying to become a forest ranger until his mother encouraged him to become a fireman.

Rather than telescoping chapters that evolve from one another, Working Fire unfolds in a series of essays. This makes for some odd jumps in time where the reader senses quite a lot must have happened to get Unger where he was when the story unfolded. One of those leaps seems central to the point of the memoir.

You would think that a book called Working Fire would be primarily about fire — its colors, its hungers, its beauties and dangers. Several fires do appear in the pages of Unger’s memoir as breathless set pieces that completely absorb the reader. But though Unger continued to work as a fireman, at some point he grew bored with waiting for fire to break out. He went back for his paramedic certification so that he could actively save the lives of people who’d dialed 911. The paradigm shift from saving buildings to saving people is huge, but isn’t explored in any detail. The only training Unger recounts here is his initial academy experience before joining his first firehouse. The point of that story seems to be that one needs to suppress any individuality one has in order to succeed. In terms of being a fireman, it is an important lesson, but doesn’t suit the arc of the book as much as exploring how he chose to get his hands bloody might have.

The fires Unger chooses to recount are strange ones: the time he got lost in a smoky basement full of pipes and survived only because the other firemen got the flames put out; the fire they couldn’t reach because the hose was too short; a grass fire in the Oakland hills; finally a real battle inside an apartment. I would have been happy with story after story about facing fire.

That said, the most emotionally intense event in the book involves no fire at all. Unger’s firetruck was summoned to an accident on the Oakland freeways. A woman was pinned inside her “black luxury car” by the engine block in her lap. As the firemen struggled to free her, Unger crouched beside her and told her they were going to get her out. One of the ambulance medics warns him to step back as soon as they pull the dashboard away from her: “That’s when they always bleed out. It’s like they wait until you’re ready to save them, and then they just die on you.” Like it’s a choice the unfortunate victim makes. In the end, the ambulance took the woman away and Unger never knew if she survived.

The heart of Unger’s book comes in the chapter called “Things I Wish I Didn’t Know.” In it, his prose approaches poetry: “Fire fighting is not about the fire. It’s about the save. It’s about keeping the flames from licking too deeply into a vulnerable life and wreaking havoc there.” In his final chapter, he spells it out: “Fire fighting isn’t really about fire in the same way that police work is obsessed with crime….Fire fighting is not about the thing we conquer but about the things we save.” It’s a distinction that I didn’t understand until reading Unger’s book.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unlike most of the other firefighting books I've read, this one focuses almost exclusively on the training period Unger had while learning the ropes of firefighting, as the book title suggests. He is a rookie throughout, so even once he finishes the training academy, his experiences working in a firehouse are peppered with lessons and words of advice from his colleagues. A good portion of the early book is focused on the training academy for firefighters in Oakland, CA. While Unger describes himself as an 'accidental fireman' in the title and backs it up by saying he learned about the opportunity from a flyer in a bus stop, he was a young guy who seemed to have done a few odd jobs here and there during and since college, but I could see how those experiences could steer a man towards a career in firefighting. Compared to his fellow trainees at the academy, Unger also didn't come with a family pedigree, the latest in many generations of firefighters, instead growing up in a white collar Jewish family and graduating from an exclusive private high school in Oakland instead of the rougher public ones that most of the others came from, so he feels like an outsider at first, but once all the gear is on, the job is the same.
Unger talks a little bit about his first firehouse, where he really didn't fit in, if for no other reason than to contrast it with the firehouse where he did most of his training and found the bond common among groups of firemen and women. There, he found guys committed to their jobs and each other as well as the occasional commander who demonstrated how NOT to lead his men, so both this good and the bad shaped him as he went out onto each call. Unger expressed how few of his calls were for actual fires that many people picture the job of a firefighter involving, instead doing many medical calls, false alarms, wildfires, and fires where the building involved was either too far gone to do anything but let burn to the ground or small such that only the first men on the scene were needed to attack it. He also addresses the tragedy of losing one of his fellow firefighters, a guy he barely knew but learned a lot from in the short time they spent together, in a building collapse and the outpouring of support the fire department experienced at his funeral.
Overall, it was an enjoyable quick read. I would have liked a few photos, to be able to see the faces of the brave men and women he describes and some of the equipment, because it's a lot easier to comprehend what he means when he talks about 6 people needed to operate a 50 foot ladder if there is a picture of said people working with the ladder.

[Bill Littell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lexile: 1070

Very much in the style of Jon Krakauer. Working fire is a lucid, articulate treatment of a field that very few of us truly understand. The writer is analytical without being tedious. At times, the text is hard to put down; at others, it gets a little prosaic. I got Tim O'Brien vibes at times.

Words of Wisdom: The word "firefighter" has a strange connotation. It seems like a natural cousin to "crime fighter," but it's different. Fire fighting isn't really about fire in the same way that police work is obsessed with crime. I don't have fire in my blood; I'm not obsessed by it. I respect fire and believe it can be beautiful at times, but I don't lie awake nights thinking of it as my sworn enemy. Fire fighting is not about the thing we conquer but about the things we save. The fire is secondary; the lives are always first. For all our macho posturing, we're just caretakers.

[Rodney Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enjoyable read no doubt, but as a fellow firefighter, I found it a bit over-dramatized at times. No offense to Mr. Unger, but constantly referring to his gear as "smoke-stained" and "blackened" was just a little over the top for me by the end. It seems as though Mr. Unger, to his credit, felt it his responsibility to keep alive the myth of the heroic firefighter, as I assume many of the readers of this book will be non-fire service individuals. I certainly could relate to many of the situations and atmospheres he described both in and outside of the firehouse. They made me chuckle as I recounted nearly exact scenarios that I experienced at one point or other. It mostly made me wish that I had documented more thoroughly my time as a rookie firefighter so that I too could have one day put it all into a memoir.

[Ann G. Daniels · Rating 5 out of 5]

I see that this book has an average rating of under 3.8. What those people were thinking, I cannot imagine. I found this book absolutely fascinating. Unger, the son of an upper-middle-class Oakland Jewish family, was always drawn to outdoors work and went into firefighting almost on a whim, not realizing that many men try for years to get into a company like Oakland's. What he learned, in his training and on the job, reflects on how we run our cities, how we treat our elderly, our poor, our drug addicts and mentally ill, how we value human life, how we get along with people of other races and socioeconomic classes, how men and women relate to each other in good times and in bad - and oh, yes, how firefighters actually put out fires. An amazing book.

[Sharat · Rating 4 out of 5]

GENRE: Autobiography
SERIES: n/a
READING LEVEL: Young Adult

This book is an autobiography by Zac Unger, he writes about how he got into the profession and how he felt like he didn't fit. Later in the book he writes about daily life as a firefighter and how the job might not be as people imagine it would be like.

I liked the book because it gave me an idea on what it's really like to be a firefighter, I also liked the book because it wasn't all about fighting fires, it was also about training and life at the station. A great quote from the book is, “Firefighting is not about the fire. It’s about the save. It’s about keeping the flames from licking too deeply into a vulnerable life and wreaking havoc there. (Unger 184)

[Sabrina Duran]

This book is too short; I wanted to follow Zac Unger into more burning buildings, more troubled streets, more firehouses. It’s a thrilling story, not just because it’s a rookie fireman’s but because of Unger’s bravery and his brain: he is an outsider-turned-insider, a preppie who heard the call. I’d like to read about Zac Unger doing almost anything because you can feel what he is going through with everything he describes as he tells us. His story is remarkable and insopires anybody wanting to go into firefighting career. We truly gave firefighters respect after the inccident 9/11 and they deserve much more. I reccomend this book and loved it!

[Juanitomandujano · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book speaks for itself. Zac Unger needed a purpose in life and he found it in an application for the Oakland Fire Department that his mama went and got for him. Not really a slacker, but unsure what he wanted to do in life, he went to school basically to become a biologist despite the fact he hated biology, but he only chose that major because he enjoyed being outdoors.

Long story short, this is his story of his days at the tower, as the academy was referred to as, and about his first couple years on the force. It is funny, and sometimes sad, but reality.

LOVED IT.

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

picked this one up from the NY state fireman's museum. this book was SO FUNNY and TRUE! no matter where you are a firefighter, the things Unger talks about in his book are constants across the board. from the training academy to rookie school to finally feeling comfortable and knowledgeable in the station, his account of the oakland fire department is just like all the rest. this is comforting and finally makes me understand why people keep calling this career a "brotherhood".

[Robert E · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is called Working Fire, by Zac Unger. I thought it was a great book and it wasn’t hard to read. I like how the author puts you into the book and make you feel like you're the characters. I can relate to the book because I’m on a volunteer fire department is a little different than a non volunteer department but the fires are the some.

I would recommend this book to people that want to learn more about fire departments or like action.

[Mat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Similar to this author, I also never dreamt of being a structural firefighter until I was one. I related to his experiences, particularly those in probie school, and also dealing with the violence, poverty, and death that working out of a firehouse entails. This was very well written without any chest beating or “thank you for my service” type cringe and captures the occasional beauty, excitement, pride, and camaraderie that are the silver linings to an often-times horrible fucking job.

[Cathal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great book, about being an Oakland firefighter, after graduating from Deep Springs and applying on a whim. He's lucky. He talks very little about the medic side of his work, which made me sad, since this is 70 to 80 percent of the job, even in Oakland, I imagine. The fire scenes and the culture are spot on.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far, I am completely engrossed in this book, and that's not good, because I have other books I HAVE to read for my YA Lit class. The author has an eye for descriptions, and funny comments about the process of becoming a fireman. I've been reading portions aloud to my family. I never knew reading about firefighters could be so interesting.

[Lex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eloquent and fascinating. Those are the two words I can think of to sum up this book. Zac not only lets you inside the brotherhood of his job, but inside his mind as well. I originally heard of him through the story of his daughter, but his own story is extremely riveting as well and an excellent read.

[Laurie Stoll · Rating 4 out of 5]

Working Fire is a truly enjoyable book. The author takes us through his decision to leave grad school and become a fire fighter.

The author did an excellent job in the writing of his story. Working Fire has humor (and the author's ability to laugh at himself), drama, and even a few heartbreaking moments.

[Trent Partridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book for whoever likes/wants to be a fireman/woman. A great story by Zac Unger where every chapter is the climax. From fighting big fires to car accidents this book has some of the best action any book.

[Joette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyone who's considering becoming a fireman should read this book.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

My firefighter husband recommended reading this book to get a perspective of his career through another mans writings.

[Traci · Rating 2 out of 5]

this was a hard book for me to push through for some reason, but i just kept going forward with it.
it was alright, not my favorite.