Fire

Sebastian Junger was eleven years old when a terrifying experience on a snow-swollen mountain left him feeling as if he'd been "some other place these people don't even know exists." The ordinary world seemed frivolous, oddly unaware, when he made his way back to it. With Fire, the new collection of journalism by the author of The Perfect Storm, Junger proves that he will travel nearly anyplace — to Kosovo and Sierra Leone, to Afghanistan and a dry-lightning fire — to bear witness to life's extremes. Junger is not a moralizing journalist. His stories in Fire, many of which have been previously published, tend to end as they begin — with a discovered detail or an irresistible fact, rather than an epiphany or a petition. The accretion of minutiae is his greatest talent: he lays down the mundane beside the lyrical — patiently, without bravado. Whereas the essays on fire display an obsessive's intensity, and the essays on war and terrorism are engrossing, instructive, and alarming, the essay called "The Whale Hunters" shows Junger at his best. It is an exhilarating piece in every sense — magnificently conceived, lovingly written, perfectly evocative of a place, a time, a passion. A portrait of the world's "last living harpooner," "The Whale Hunters" depicts a gory — even horrific — business with poetically precise prose, as when Junger writes, of the harpooner's whale boat, "The Why Ask...was built on the beach with the horizon as a level and Ollivierre's memory as a plan."

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