Ten years ago Philip Connors threw in his job as a copy editor for the Wall Street Journal and set off for the New Mexico wilderness to become a fire lookout, a profession ‘I thought … had gone the way of itinerant cowboys, small-time gold prospectors, and other icons of an older, wilder West.’ Every summer since then he has returned to the Gila National Forest to watch for wildfires, living alone with his dog in a hut many miles from any other human habitation. His diary of a typical summer in the life of a fire watcher is a heady blend of self-examination, keen-eyed nature observation and environmental jeremiad, and bears comparison with such classics of the genre as Thoreau’s Walden and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac.

Pan | Paperback 300 pp. |ISBN: 9781447208143