About this item
From one of the last working fire lookouts comes this sequel to the award-winning Fire Season -- a story of calamity and resilience in the world's first Wilderness.A dozen years into his dream job keeping watch over the Gila National Forest of New Mexico, Philip Connors bore witness to the blaze he had always feared: a megafire that forced him off his mountain by helicopter, and forever changed the forest and watershed he loved. It was one of many transformations that arrived in quick succession, not just fire and flood, but the death of a fellow lookout in a freak accident and a tragic plane crash that rocked the community he called home.Beginning as an elegy for a friend he cherished like a brother, A Song for the River opens into a chorus of voices singing in celebration of a landscape redolent with meaning -- and the river that runs through it, whose waters are threatened by a potential dam.
About the Author
In 2002, Philip Connors left the Wall Street Journal for a seasonal job with the U.S. Forest Service in New Mexico. That became the subject of his first book, Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout, which was named the best nature book of 2011 by Amazon and won a National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, the Reading the West Award for Nonfiction, and the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Book Competition. His second book, All the Wrong Places, recounts his life in the shadow of his brother's suicide and was named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of 2015 by Kirkus. He lives in the Mexican-American borderlands. Visit his web site at www.philipconnors.com
