This book is amazing, and through it Norman Maclean has emerged as one of my favorite writers. ( )

The tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire of 1949 in Montana cut thirteen lives short. A group of smokejumpers (parachute firefighters) sent out to contain a fire were trapped by the fire themselves and died all within a quarter of an hour. They might have survived if they had followed their leader or if they had had better training or if they worked together.

The book is a tribute to a group of young daredevils. One had survived the cold hell of Bastogne to die by fire. Another had braved the seas of WWII to perish in the mountains. At the fringe of civilization, together with the local drunks and never-do-wells, they were sent to battle nature. Nature both splendid and terrible, forceful and dangerous.

This book is both a report of the disaster and an analysis of its group and leadership processes. It served as the basis for Karl E. Weick's must read paper). McLean resolves puzzle by puzzle to reconstruct the last minutes of their lives in painstaking detail.

This book is also an old man's obsessive search for truth. McLean was 47 years old when the tragedy happened. He was 74 when he started working on this book. He tracked down archival information, interviewed and pestered witnesses and relatives. The US Forest Service both learned from the tragedy (and prevented a reoccurence by changing its training methods) and covered up its mistakes by influencing witnesses, altering their testimonies and tampering with evidence. McLean with all the time of a lonely retiree tracks down every path, climbs Mann Gulch multiple times (together with two survivors). The book becomes his life's work and purpose. Although, for all practical purposes he has uncovered everything, there is to know about the disaster, he soldiers on, investigates, questions himself, chasing the white whale. Young men and fire is also a portrait of an old man, clinging on to life, wanting to know, knowing that soon all his knowledge will disappear forever.

Highly recommended. A must read for everybody interested in small-unit interactions and decision-making processes. ( )

Maclean didn't get to finish editing this book, and the last third feels rougher than the rest. Still, this thoughtful, book length essay is amazing. The author spirals three times through the story of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire that claimed the lives of a dozen smokejumpers. Each pass, he brings the reader closer to the unknowable - what it must have felt like to flee from the fire; how each of the smokejumpers must have made his decision to keep running for the ridgeline or hunker down and hope to survive. As the book progresses, it balances on an increasingly fine edge - on the one hand, the reconstructed details function like a zoom lens, taking us ever closer to the critical, fatal moments of the tragedy; while on the other, the truth of what must have happened slides ever further out of reach, lost beyond the limits of our ability to know.

Though the title refers to 'Young Men', this felt like anything but a young man's book. Reading it a few years ago, I loved the writing and was moved by the story, but felt I was skipping over depths that I'd only really be able to understand with the passage of years and years of time. Perhaps it's time to try reading it again. ( )