"Teddy Roosevelt And The 'Burn' That Saved Forests" from WHYY Radio, NPR Fresh Air with Terry Gross [original posting, broadcast: Oct, 2009]

Timothy Egan's "The Big Burn" was just released on paperback, and so, WHYY Radio, NPR Fresh Air rebroadcast last year's interview with the author.

In his new book The Big Burn, author Timothy Egan takes us back to 1910, to the scene of the largest forest fire in American history. Three million acres — an area the size of Connecticut — burned down in Idaho and Montana over the course of a single weekend. More than 70 people died. The Idaho Statesman has since remembered it as "a conflagration of biblical proportions," and Egan says the fire was of a singular kind, "a monster that takes on a life of its own." But in The Big Burn — subtitled Teddy Roosevelt and The Fire That Saved America — Egan argues that the fire actually saved the nation's forests, even as its flames charred the trees. The disaster served to strengthen the fledgling U.S. Forest Service, and rally public opinion behind Theodore Roosevelt's plan to protect national lands. Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of five books. He won the National Book Award for his critically acclaimed Dust Bowl chronicle The Worst Hard Time.

Download the NPR WHYY Fresh Air podcast here. Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer and journalist. He maintains the New York Times blog, "The Opinionator," and recently wrote about two personalities, a "junkie" and an "atheist," Keith Richards and Christopher Hitchens respectively. His column, blog, whatever you want to call it, is usually enlightening in the sense that it doesn't get caught up in over opinions about current affairs, but rather sheds true opinions, unique and enlightening ideas, and in his recent posting, relationships; the relationship between a junkie and an atheist. In his latest post, Hitchens' bout cancer is evoked. It cuts to the materialism of our ideals, and it's the ideas in posts like this, that make a subscription to The New York Times on the Kindle worth it (even if you can get it at the desk or on the laptop for free). Check that latest entry out, here. See also: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (Vintage Departures), Breaking Blue, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West