Get our Best Book Club Books of 2025 eBook!

Summary and Reviews of Fire Season by Philip Connors

Fire Season by Philip Connors

Fire Season

Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

by Philip Connors
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (3):
  • First Published:
  • Apr 1, 2011, 256 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Feb 2012, 288 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Book Summary

A decade ago Philip Connors left work as an editor at the Wall Street Journal and talked his way into a job as one of the last fire lookouts in America. Fire Season is Connors's remarkable reflection on work, our place in the wild, and the charms of solitude.

A decade ago Philip Connors left work as an editor at the Wall Street Journal and talked his way into a job far from the streets of lower Manhattan: working as one of the last fire lookouts in America. Spending nearly half the year in a 7' x 7' tower, 10,000 feet above sea level in remote New Mexico, his tasks were simple: keep watch over one of the most fire-prone forests in the country and sound the alarm at the first sign of smoke.

Fire Season is Connors's remarkable reflection on work, our place in the wild, and the charms of solitude. The landscape over which he keeps watch is rugged and roadless - it was the first region in the world to be officially placed off limits to industrial machines - and it typically gets hit by lightning more than 30,000 times per year. Connors recounts his days and nights in this forbidding land, untethered from the comforts of modern life: the eerie pleasure of being alone in his glass-walled perch with only his dog Alice for company; occasional visits from smokejumpers and long-distance hikers; the strange dance of communion and wariness with bears, elk, and other wild creatures; trips to visit the hidden graves of buffalo soldiers slain during the Apache wars of the nineteenth century; and always the majesty and might of lightning storms and untamed fire.

Written with narrative verve and startling beauty, and filled with reflections on his literary forebears who also served as lookouts - among them Edward Abbey, Jack Kerouac, Norman Maclean, and Gary Snyder - Fire Season is a book to stand the test of time.

A Talent for Sloth

The landscape where I work, in far southwest New Mexico, is one of the most fire-prone areas in America. I look out over a stretch of country with nearly a million acres of roadless wilderness, where an annual upsurge of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico combines with the summertime heat of the Chihuahuan Desert to create tens of thousands of lightning strikes. In an arid land with brief but intense storm activity, wildfire is no aberration.

My lookout tower is situated five miles from the nearest road, on a ten-thousand-foot peak in the Gila National Forest. I live here for several months each year, without electricity or running water. Although tens of thousands of acres are touched by fire here every year, I can go weeks without seeing a twist of smoke. During these lulls I simply watch and wait, my eyes becoming ever more intimate with an ecological transition zone encompassing dry grasslands, piñon-juniper foothills, ponderosa parkland, and spruce-fir ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Fire Season is an anatomy of solitude, a paean to a wild American landscape, a history of wildfires and those who watch them, a celebration of adventure, and a demonstration of the connection between looking hard, thinking deeply and writing brilliantly...continued

Full Review Members Only (816 words)

(Reviewed by Jo Perry).

Media Reviews

Kirkus Reviews
Print journalist and fire lookout: When it comes to paying jobs, Connors has a death wish, but he has made the very best of it.

Publishers Weekly
[R]uminative, lyrical, occasionally suspenseful...bristles with the narrative energy and descriptive precision of Annie Dillard and dovetails between elegiac introspection and a history of [Connor's] curious and lonely occupation.

Author Blurb Annie Proulx
An excellent, informative, and delightful book.

Author Blurb Barry Lopez
Philip Connors’s remarkable account of his seasons as a fire lookout on the Gila National Forest in New Mexico is enlightening and well-informed. The surprise in the book is the author's willingness - his courage, actually - to examine his own naïveté about the natural world. His is a most welcome new voice.

Author Blurb Philip Gourevitch
What a wonderful book. Philip Connors went up to the mountaintop to serve as a lookout - and he has come down with a masterwork of close observation, deep reflection, and hard-won wisdom. This is an unforgettable reckoning with the American land.

Reader Reviews

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



The Gila National Forest

As a fire lookout, Philip Connors called New Mexico's Gila National Forest home. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, in 1924 this nationally protected area was established (at the advocacy of conservationist Aldo Leopold) as "the first designated wilderness in the country."

Gila National Forest This means that "there are no roads; the only travel permitted is by foot or horseback. You will find no logging, resorts or commercial uses of any kind except grazing," which is why Connors hiked in and out to his tower and chopped his wood by hand. Today, it remains the largest, roadless wilderness in the national forest system.

Contained within the Gila National Forest is the Gila National Wilderness, the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, and...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked Fire Season, try these:

  • The Electric Woman jacket

    The Electric Woman

    by Tessa Fontaine

    Published 2019

    About this book

    Tessa Fontaine's astonishing memoir of pushing past fear, The Electric Woman, follows the author on a life-affirming journey of loss and self-discovery - through her time on the road with the last traveling American sideshow and her relationship with an adventurous, spirited mother.

  • Breaking Wild jacket

    Breaking Wild

    by Diane Les Becquets

    Published 2017

    About this book

    More by this author

    In captivating prose, Diane Les Becquets tells the story of one woman missing in the Colorado wilderness and another bent on discovering the missing woman's whereabouts, in an unforgettably moving and thrilling literary debut.

We have 10 read-alikes for Fire Season, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
More books by Philip Connors
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    Lies and Weddings
    by Kevin Kwan
    A forbidden affair erupts at a lavish Hawaiian wedding in this wild comedy from the author of Crazy Rich Asians.
  • Book Jacket
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Based on the author’s family story, comes an extraordinary novel about a mother and her daughters’ escape from Taiwan.
  • Book Jacket
    The Lilac People
    by Milo Todd
    For fans of All the Light We Cannot See, a poignant tale of a trans man’s survival in Nazi Germany and postwar Berlin.
  • Book Jacket
    The Girls of Good Fortune
    by Kristina McMorris
    Brave the Shanghai tunnels in this tale of love, identity, and resilience passed through generations.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Erased
    by Anna Malaika Tubbs

    In Erased, Anna Malaika Tubbs recovers all that American patriarchy has tried to destroy.

  • Book Jacket

    Awake in the Floating City
    by Susanna Kwan

    A debut novel about an artist and a 130-year-old woman bound by love and memory in a future, flooded San Francisco.

  • Book Jacket

    The Original Daughter
    by Jemimah Wei

    A dazzling debut by Jemimah Wei about ambition, sisterhood, and family bonds in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore.

  • Book Jacket

    Songs of Summer
    by Jane L. Rosen

    A young woman crashes a Fire Island wedding to find her birth mother—and gets more than she bargained for.

Who Said...

Use what talents you possess: The woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

B W M in H M

and be entered to win..