Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
“Everything that is absent in the current political crises of this nation is abundantly present in Philip Connors’ A Song for the River: humility, quietude, forgiveness, and gratitude. His writing is pure, exact, compassionate, and often elegaic...I loved this book.” Benjamin Alire Sáenz, winner of the PEN/Faulkner for Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club
Review
“Philip Connors’ A Song for the River is nothing short of spectacular. With deep, clear-eyed honesty, Connors weaves the tragic story of friends gone too soon within the tale of a region, its haunting wilderness, and a meandering river. He sets out on a quest for answers, only to remind us of our common humanity. Beautifully nuanced and written in masterful prose, this is a necessary read.” Alfredo Corchado, Mexico Border correspondent, The Dallas Morning News, author of Midnight in Mexico
Review
"A Song for the River blends a poetic voice with a naturalist’s knowledge and a journalist’s determination to document continued threats to the Gila River and its massive surrounding acreage, which became the nation’s original wilderness area in 1924." New Mexico Magazine
About the Author
Philip Connors grew up on a farm in Minnesota and studied print journalism at the University of Montana. Beginning in 1999 he worked at the Wall Street Journal, mostly as an editor on the Leisure & Arts page. In 2002 he left New York to become a fire lookout in New Mexico's Gila National Forest, where he has spent every summer since. That experience became the subject of his first book, Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout. It won the National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Reading the West Award for nonfiction, and the Grand Prize from the Banff Mountain Book Competition. His essays have appeared in Harper's, the London Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, the Nation, and n+1. His second book, All the Wrong Places, a memoir of life in the shadow of his brother's suicide, was published in 2015; his third book, A Song for the River, is forthcoming in 2018. He lives in the Mexican-American borderlands.