*Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award *Winner of the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award *Winner of the Reading the West Award for Nonfiction *Winner of the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Book Competition

Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

Connors, Philip

Sports & Outdoors

Ecco

*Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award *Winner of the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award *Winner of the Reading the West Award for Nonfiction *Winner of the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Book Competition

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

The prize-winning author of Fire Season returns with the story of what drove him to find solace in the wilderness: his brother's shocking and violent death. In his debut Fire Season, Philip Connors recounted with lyricism, wisdom, and grace his decade as a fire lookout high above remote New Mexico. Now he tells the story of what made solitude on the mountain so attractive: the years he spent reeling in the wake of a family tragedy. At the age of twenty-three, Connors was a young man on the make. He'd left behind the Midwestern farm on which he'd grown up and the brother with whom he'd never been especially close. He had a magazine job lined up in New York City and a future unfolding just as he'd hoped. Then one phone call out of the blue changed everything. All the Wrong Places is a searingly honest account of the aftermath of his brother's shocking suicide, exploring both the pathos and the unlikely humor of a life unmoored by loss. Beginning with the otherworldly beauty of a hot-air-balloon ride over the skies of Albuquerque and ending in the wilderness of the American borderlands, this is the story of a man paying tribute to the dead by unconsciously willing himself into all the wrong places, whether at the copy desk of the Wall Street Journal, in the gritty streets of Bed-Stuy in the 1990s, or amid the smoking rubble of the World Trade Center. With ruthless clarity and a keen sense of the absurd, Connors slowly unmasks the truth about his brother and himself, to devastating effect. Like Cheryl Strayed's Wild, this is a powerful look back at wayward years―and a redemptive story about finding one's rightful home in the world.

All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found

Self-Help

Death & Grief

W.W.Norton&Company

In the tradition of Desert Solitaire and Shop Class as Soulcraft, this is a remarkable debut from a major new voice in American nonfiction -- a meditation on nature and life, witnessed from the heights of one of the last fire-lookout towers in America. For nearly a decade, Philip Connors has spent half of each year in a seven-by-seven foot fire-lookout tower, ten thousand feet above sea level in one of the remotest territories of New Mexico. One of the least developed parts of the country, the first region designated as an official wilderness area in the world, the section he tends is also one of the most fire-prone, suffering more than thirty thousand lightning strikes each year. Written with gusto, charm, and a sense of history, Fire Season captures the wonder and grandeur of this most unusual job and place: the eerie pleasure of solitude, the strange dance of communion and mistrust with its animal inhabitants, and the majesty, might, and beauty of untamed fire at its wildest. Connors' time up on the peak is filled with drama -- there are fires large and small; spectacular midnight lightning storms and silent mornings awakening above the clouds; surprise encounters with long-distance hikers, smokejumpers, bobcats, black bears, and an abandoned, dying fawn. Filled with Connors' heartfelt reflections on our place in the wild, on other writers who have worked as lookouts -- Jack Kerouac, Edward Abbey, Norman Maclean, Gary Snyder -- and on the ongoing debate over whether fires should be suppressed or left to burn, Fire Season is a remarkable homage to the beauty of nature, the blessings of solitude, and the freedom of the independent spirit. As Connors writes, ''I've seen lunar eclipses and desert sandstorms and lightning that made my hair stand on end. I've watched deer and elk frolic in the meadow below me and pine trees explode in a blue ball of smoke. If there's a better job anywhere on the planet, I'd like to know what it is.''

Fire Season

Ulverscroft

The West is vital to the myth of America. It is where radical individualism and beautiful landscapes merge in a sort of earthly paradise. Or so we've been led to believe by cinematic and literary mythmakers. There is, however, a counter-narrative put forth by writers such as Joan Didion and Mike Davis, who argue that the myths of the West met their end on California's golden shores some time ago, in ecological catastrophe and social anomie. Between these visions lies another West where contradictions abound. No other part of the country is as undeveloped; yet no other part of the country contains urban areas that are growing as quickly, where there are struggles over the West's most precious commodity, water; over how to manage and maintain wilderness; over the pace and character of the sprawl that threatens to turn Denver and Phoenix into inland LA's. Amid these struggles, individuals still try to create a place for themselves that allows for a connection to the landscape and a connection to some form of community. The New West Reader explores the conflicts and contractions that make up the contemporary West with writing by Larry McMurtry, Sherman Alexie, Edward Abbey, and others.

New West Reader: Essays on an Ever-Evolving Frontier (Nation Books)

Literature & Fiction

United States

Nation Books

A Song for the River

* One of Amazon's Best Nonfiction Books of the Year* One of Publishers Weekly's Best Nonfiction Books of the Year* A Southwest Book of the Year Award Winner * An NPR Summer Reading List Pick 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. The ways of water and the ways of fire, the lines tragedy carves on a life, the persistent renewal of green shoots sprouting from ash: these are the subjects of A Song for the River. Its argument on behalf of things wild and free could not be more timely; the goal is nothing less than permanent protection for that rarest of things in the American West, a free-flowing river―the sinuous and gorgeous Gila. It must not perish.

Cinco Puntos Press

* One of Amazon's Best Nonfiction Books of the Year* One of Publishers Weekly's Best Nonfiction Books of the Year* A Southwest Book of the Year Award Winner * An NPR Summer Reading List Pick 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. The ways of water and the ways of fire, the lines tragedy carves on a life, the persistent renewal of green shoots sprouting from ash: these are the subjects of A Song for the River. Its argument on behalf of things wild and free could not be more timely; the goal is nothing less than permanent protection for that rarest of things in the American West, a free-flowing river―the sinuous and gorgeous Gila. It must not perish.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Connors, Philip. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Connors, Philip

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Connors, Philip. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found

Fire Season

New West Reader: Essays on an Ever-Evolving Frontier (Nation Books)

A Song for the River

A Song for the River