A song for the river /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Best Nonfiction Books of the Year, Publishers Weekly
Best Books for the Summer 2018, Publishers Weekly

The mountain he loves goes up in flames. His friend and fellow lookout dies. He falls in love. Wilderness endures.

From one of the last fire lookouts in America 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 Wilderness of New Mexico, Philip Connors bore witness to the wildfire he had always feared: a conflagration that forced him off his mountain by helicopter, and changed forever the forest and watershed he loved. It was merely one of many transformations that arrived in quick succession, not just fire and flood but illness, divorce, the death of a fellow lookout in a freak accident, and a tragic plane crash that rocked the community he called home.

At its core an elegy for a friend he cherished like a brother, A Song for the River opens into celebration of a landscape redolent with meaning--and the river that runs through it. Connors channels the voices of the voiceless in a praise song of great urgency, and makes a plea to save a vital piece of our natural and cultural heritage: the wild Gila River, whose waters are threatened by a potential dam.

Brimming with vivid characters and beautiful evocations of the landscape, A Song for the River carries the story of the Gila Wilderness forward to the present precarious moment, and manages to find green shoots everywhere sprouting from the ash. Its argument on behalf of things wild and free could not be more timely, and its 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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

As a fire lookout at New Mexico's Gila National Forest, Connors (Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout) spent summers working in the Gila River wilderness, getting to know the region and its inhabitants intimately. This moving memoir recounts a trio of tragic events that impacted him deeply at a time when he was recuperating from several significant life changes. The mountain he calls home burns, another lookout he has grown close to dies suddenly, and a plane containing a group of optimistic students and their teacher working to save the river crashes. In the style of Annie -Dillard, Anne LaBastille, and Aldo Leopold, Connors interlaces all of these stories into a poignant plea for change-of our attitudes toward nature as well as to all forms of life. VERDICT Readers who enjoy personal narratives and nature writing will be drawn to this book, which is a nice companion to the author's earlier work, Fire Season.-Venessa Hughes, Buffalo, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

This slim but potent volume of essays from Connors (Fire Season) beautifully examines themes of fire and water, life and death, and wonder and grief in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico. Connors begins with a litany of suffering-his own and his friends'-from disease, divorce, wildfire, and deaths. Among the last, Connors writes about John, a fellow fire lookout, who died when his horse slipped off a mountain path and fell on him, and three teens (including Ella Jaz, an advocate for an undammed Gila River) who died in a small-plane crash. As Connors tells of these deaths and the ways in which he honors them (Jaz's death led him to get involved in her cause), he also tells of his own physical hurts and of Mónica, the woman who relieved his pain and became his wife. His sumptuous descriptions of the Gila's natural wonders, from a lone mountain tree frog to roaring wildfires, enliven the entire work, as do his skillful turns of phrase and pointed observations ("Each of us, in the wake of a bullet's destruction, had checked into the guilt suite at the Hotel Sorrow and re-upped for a few hundred weeks"). This powerful work belongs with the classics of the nature writing genre and is equally important as a rumination on living and dying. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

In his debut, Fire Season (2011), Connors recounted his career as a fire lookout in New Mexico's Gila Wilderness. His latest, as much a collection of interrelated personal essays as a memoir, serves as a companion to his first, but this time Connors turns his binoculars toward friendship, aging, death, and the mighty Gila River. Still healing from hip surgery, Connors takes his new wife into the wilderness, where he reflects on the untimely death of a gifted high-school girl who died while studying wildfires, and whose memory haunts the book. In Birthday for the Next Forest, he witnesses a lightning strike that becomes a massive forest fire and considers the controversial history of prescribed natural fires. A Hummingbird's Kiss pays homage to his late friend and fellow lookout, John, who helped search for three high-schoolers involved in a plane accident, and whose ashes Connors releases into the Gila River. Connors' wonderfully digressive musings offer thoughtful glimpses into the more sociable aspects of fire-watching, such as they are, and expresses longing for a bygone era of nature conservation.--Jonathan Fullmer Copyright 2018 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

A veteran fire lookout in the mountains of southern New Mexico ponders life and death in one of North America's oldest wilderness areas.In his first book, Fire Season (2011), Connors (All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found, 2015) focused on a year spent as a fire lookout for the Forest Service. Here, he's back in the Gila Wilderness area in his tiny yet beloved fire tower/office/living quarters where he had spent numerous summers gazing through binoculars, searching out and reporting smoke outbreaks. To kick off the adventure, the author took a raft trip down the Gila, a twisting, turning knot of river with likely the shortest rafting season of all of America's waterways. The occasion? To navigate the river perhaps one last time before the government launches a possible dam project currently being studied. Along the journey, we meet the ghosts of Connors' recently deceased friendsJohn, a fellow fire lookout, and Ella Jazz, a multitalented, brilliant high school student whose life was cut short while studying the ecological benefits of natural wildfires. A running controversy among scholars of forestry, the traditional logic was once to suppress wildfires, which was the purpose of having lookouts on the government payroll. Recently, however, the philosophy has been to allow wildfires to burn freely, providing a fresh environment for healthy new growth. Connors keeps both feet firmly planted in the nurture camp despite the fact that this new science, along with growing satellite technology, threatens the continuing existence of fire lookouts altogether. As the author recalls his friends and times they shared in the Gila, he reflects on spreading their ashes, drawing the parallel between a free-burning wildfire and the deaths of his friends, reconciling both with the idea that from death springs new life.A heartfelt, well-written volume of vignettes and reflections of a man whomuch like his long lineage of fire lookout forebearsgladly chooses to escape civilization for the natural world. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Philip Connors was born in Iowa, 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 , which Amazon named the best nature book of the year in 2011. 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 , High Country News , Lapham's Quarterly , 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. He lives in the Mexican-American borderlands.