Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars | 1,933 ratings

Price: 19.69

Last update: 03-25-2025


About this item

A stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind from the award-winning, best-selling author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce

“Riveting, spellbinding, astounding on every page…Captures the majesty and horror of one of [our] great disasters.” —David Wallace-Wells, #1 bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.

For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.

With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillanttakes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.


* This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF of maps, images, and charts from the book.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.


Top reviews from the United States

  • Tena S.
    5.0 out of 5 stars Read it even if you think you don't want to
    Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2024
    If you're concerned about climate change, you must read this book. If you're not, you'll still love it. It's an incredibly well-written and gripping story about the biggest wildlife in North America as of 2016. It reads like a thriller, and I got to point in it where I simply could not put it down.
  • Led-by-Luv & Adventure !!!
    5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommend !!!
    Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2025
    Hello.
    This text is all-encompassing regarding anything you want to know about the oil industry & its consequences in a specific area of Canada.
    Extremely in-depth describing an horrific fire that occurred there.
    Excellent narration.
    Much information.
    A subject everyone should be aware of &
    how this industry affects the planet.

    Thank you to the author for composing this revelatory treatise.
  • kevin osborn
    4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Read
    Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2024
    The style of writing was refreshing and the facts and technical details were very helpful to understand the whole fire situation
  • james king
    5.0 out of 5 stars Wow!
    Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2024
    A great read! Read everything and anything he writes. So good and compelling.
  • Glenn Ledbetter
    5.0 out of 5 stars Maybe so, Climate Change
    Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2024
    Shortly after beginning to read John Vaillant’s book, Fire Weather, I realized that I’m the type of person that he took aim at—a Climate Change doubter. At first, when Gore did his show on global warming in "An Inconvenient Truth" in 2006, I was a denier (like an atheist). Perhaps I was simply suffering from the Lucretius Problem: it was beyond my experience, so I could not accept it. Show me the data, show me the causal relationship, prove it to me.

    In Atmospheric Science 101, I had learned to distinguish weather from climate and learned how enormous and powerful the earth’s atmospheric system is. To me, it’s always seemed beyond our ability to influence weather, much less climate. I remember the failure of rain dances to end droughts and of seeding cyclones and hurricanes to weaken them and mitigate their damage. If we can’t influence weather, how do we dare to dream of influencing climate?

    The proponents of Climate Change would cite levels of CO2 that were supposedly in the atmosphere in past eons of geologic time, as if they had collected the benchmark data themselves. How dare they claim any such accuracy? Not only that, but they would also make projections of doom by certain years, and those years would come and go without the predicted catastrophes. Their calculations and warnings were obviously wrong. Why trust such flawed futurists? (Vaillant writes that the data come from analysis of tree rings and ice cores.)

    These and other objections prevented me from taking the bait. Then in June 2023, along comes Vaillant and his Fire Weather. Doggone it if he didn’t seem to address, in various chapters, all my objections in substantive terms, citing data and sources and using the fire in 2016 in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada as a literary device to make the case for Climate Change. Newly massive wildfires, he writes, are one of the results or products or consequences or symptoms or manifestations of Climate Change. Hence, his book’s subtitle, “A True Story from a Hotter World.”

    He is so thorough in his research and analysis that his picture of our future world climate became so overwhelmingly bleak and depressing to me that, one night, somewhere around Chapter 22 or 23, I simply closed the book and put it down. I wasn’t going to quit; I was just overwhelmed and didn’t want to read anymore. Several days later, I finally picked it up again and finished it.

    I can’t say that I am now a true-blue convert and an unquestioning believer, and while I do worry about our future and support general efforts to lessen man-made emissions of CO2, I’m not a frantic activist. I gave the book five stars only because Vaillant had the honesty and wisdom to acknowledge revirescence in the Epilogue. Whenever there is disaster or catastrophe, some life survives, and both Nature and humans respond and recover from it. He cites tulips and amaryllis flowers “pushing through the ash” soon after the Fort McMurray wildfire. He adds, “Earth’s capacity for revirescence is without parallel in the known universe.” He says there have been five extinction periods in earth’s history, yet here we are among the other plants and animals, some of which will become extinct, too.

    “It is almost unbearable to consider that our reckoning with industrial CO2 is only in its infancy, and that future generations will bear this burden far more heavily than we do now…In this case, at the planetary level, there is no justice; the punishment will be shared by all, but most severely by the young, the innocent, and the as-yet unborn…In the meantime, life will persist, and so will we.”

    That broad, wise perspective, and the caring that is within it, won his book five stars from me.
  • Bob S.
    5.0 out of 5 stars An engrossing account of where we are headed if we don't put a check on global warming.
    Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2024
    Intense page turner. Scary to think about what's next if our leaders don't accept the reality of not taming global warming.
  • Ben S
    3.0 out of 5 stars Important and well-written, but 9 hours?
    Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2024
    The writing is first class and the subject is extremely relevant and important in our time. But I was unable to commit to 9 hours on the subject.
  • wildcat
    4.0 out of 5 stars Good fire chemistry, history and sociological essays
    Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2024
    A good essayist -- an incident possibly not well known outside Canada but getting to be a yearly event. Right up there with Steven Pyne's better works. Not to mention Norman MacClean, Alston Chase..

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