On Timothy Egan's "The Big Burn" & the Obligatory Fall Foliage Photo

I recently finished Timothy Egan’s The Big Burn (2009) and rank it as one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read in the last few years. His analysis of the fight between conservative and progressive politics of the era, which mirrors to some extent our own today, are worth the read, but my favorite section is the description of the “blow up” that happened around August 20th, 1910—a hurricane-like explosion of fire, driven by winds up 80 miles per hour, that destroyed an area the size of Connecticut, and that killed @ 130 fire fighters. Owning a home in fire-prone Colorado makes it seem all the more real (and dangerous) to me, but I think it should be interesting to anyone, especially those readers with environmentalist sympathies.
And on that note, I can’t help but post a photo taken of Penns Creek in Poe Valley State Park, Pennsylvania. The leaves are peaking in my little corner of the world. Or as Denis Johnson once wrote in Jesus’ Son (1992), “The sky is blue, and the dead are coming back.”