Review: "When It All Burns" by Jordan Thomas

When It All Burns by Jordan Thomas
Published May 2025 via Riverhead Books
★★★★

By some measures, being a hotshot is among the most difficult jobs on earth. Hotshots don't just mountaineer; they mountaineer with chainsaws, and they do so in thick smoke, often in unprecedented heat, along the edges of the most extreme conflagrations in recorded history. In the mountains of California's Sierra Nevada range, hotshots sometimes train alongside Olympic athletes because their jobs require an equivalent level of tactical athleticism. They need to be able to hike for hours, cut line for miles, command helicopters and airplanes from their radios on the ground, and maintain a constant awareness of all the shifting conditions that could change the fire's spread. Their lives depend on these abilities. (loc. 364*)

In another life, I want to be a wildland firefighter. Not necessarily a hotshot or a smokejumper, and not this life—not when I'm busy doing other things and my knees are already too old to cooperate with me much of the time and I already know far too much about how little the US government thinks of the people doing this difficult, often precise, dangerous work. (Maybe in other countries it is better—quick, where are the wildland firefighting memoirs from Europe, Asia, Oceania?) But Thomas was a wildland firefighter, in this lifetime. A hotshot and also an academic, he was studying anthropology when he got interested in fire—fire, and firefighting, and the ways Native Americans used fire to manage the land, and the ways the colonizers weaponized that fire by criminalizing it, positioning nature as an adversary, creating conditions in which more and more flammable material built up, and humans could manage it less and less.

Thomas blends memoir with research here. The memoir part describes his season on a hotshot crew in one of the hottest years on record, one in which he and the rest of the crew battled blazes that would have been unimaginable to all but tuned-in scientists even fifty years ago. Thomas was the new guy on the crew—not new to wildland firefighting but new to being a hotshot (highly trained, the technicians of wildland firefighting), and struggling to learn his role as a sawyer and keep up and simply conceive of the scale of what they were doing. The research part of things digs deep into history and anthropology, from massacres of Native Americans to the continued devastation inflicted by loggers and politicians.

It's a hard read but a gripping one. I've read a lot of firefighting memoir (again: in another life...), so I was already familiar with a lot of the wtf moments (did you know that wildland firefighters are typically seasonal employees working on low pay and no benefits—meaning, crucially, no insurance if they're injured on the job? I did, but it makes me mad every time I read about it), but there's always something new to learn (did you know that a lot of fire retardant dumps are done—at great expense—to quell public outcry of "where are the planes?" rather than because it will actually be useful where it is being dumped? I did not!).

I've you've been thinking at all about fires and climate change recently, or fires and history, or climate change and history, this is a good one—one of the better books about fire that I've read. It slows down a little at the end (as expected, Thomas did not pursue a longer career as a hotshot), but it's full of fascinating, if often depressing, context and detail.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.