Stephen J. Pyne

This anthology offers a unique and sweeping view of the nation’s fire scene by distilling observations on Florida, California, the Northern Rockies, the Great Plains, the Southwest, the Interior West, the Northeast, Alaska, the oak woodlands, and the Pacific Northwest into a single, readable volume. The essays offer a color-commentary companion to the play-by-play narrative offered in Pyne’s Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America.

To the Last Smoke is Stephen J. Pyne’s way of “keeping with it to the end,” encompassing the directive from his rookie season as a wildland firefighter to stay with every fire “to the last smoke.”
 

The Great Ages of Discovery is a fascinating conceptual framework for understanding the past 600 years of exploration by Western civilization and its relationship to contemporary society. Stephen J. Pyne expertly organizes the vast narrative of Western exploration into three distinctive ages of discovery.