Blazing Heritage

"Our national parks, America's iconic landscapes, were always the prime laboratory for experimentation with fire. In telling the story of wildfire and the parks, Rothman highlights the intersection of scientific research and popular sentiment in American society, and illustrates the centrality of the Park Service's evolving policies to public debates over wilderness and recreation."--Résumé de l'éditeur.

From a fire policy of prevention at all costs to today's restored burning, Between Two Fires is America's history channeled through the story of wildland fire management. Stephen J. Pyne tells of a fire revolution that began in the 1960s as a reaction to simple suppression and single-agency hegemony, and then matured into more enlightened programs of fire management. It describes the counterrevolution of the 1980s that stalled the movement, the revival of reform after 1994, and the fire scene that has evolved since then. Pyne is uniquely qualified to tell America’s fire story. The author of more than a score of books, he has told fire’s history in the United States, Australia, Canada, Europe, and the Earth overall. In his earlier life, he spent fifteen seasons with the North Rim Longshots at Grand Canyon National Park. In Between Two Fires, Pyne recounts how, after the Great Fires of 1910, a policy of fire suppression spread from America’s founding corps of foresters into a national policy that manifested itself as a costly all-out war on fire. After fifty years of attempted fire suppression, a revolution in thinking led to a more pluralistic strategy for fire’s restoration. The revolution succeeded in displacing suppression as a sole strategy, but it has failed to fully integrate fire and land management and has fallen short of its goals. Today, the nation’s backcountry and increasingly its exurban fringe are threatened by larger and more damaging burns, fire agencies are scrambling for funds, firefighters continue to die, and the country seems unable to come to grips with the fundamentals behind a rising tide of megafires. Pyne has once again constructed a history of record that will shape our next century of fire management. Between Two Fires is a story of ideas, institutions, and fires. It’s America’s story told through the nation’s flames.

This reprint of the all-star war-comics anthology is an expanded edition, with a cover gallery featuring all of Frazetta's painted covers and exclusive interviews with Goodwin and publisher James Warren.

Martin Bridge returns with a third book of slice-of-life adventures in the daily life of an eight-year-old boy.

Robert Markle (1936–1990) was an infamous figure on the Canadian cultural scene for almost three decades. His paintings and drawings celebrating the female nude were deemed obscene by Ontario courts in 1965, and Markle defended them on national television, emphasizing what he considered a crucial distinction between eroticism and pornography. Although Markle was a Mohawk who employed Native symbolism in his later work, he refused to identify himself as a Native painter. Blazing Figures chronicles Markle’s boyhood in Hamilton, Ontario, his early exposure to the worlds of burlesque and jazz, and, following his expulsion from the Ontario College of Art, his immersion in the Toronto world of painting and music. It recounts his emergence as a controversial expressionist painter of the figure and a beloved teacher of his craft. After his abandonment of urban life for small-town Ontario, Markle, in the last twenty years of his life, produced his greatest works and formed close friendships with his fellow painters and with public figures Patrick Watson and Gordon Lightfoot, both of whom were interviewed at length for this book. The book also takes a frank look at Markle’s complex relationship with his wife and muse that survived his affairs with other women. The only full-length work written about Robert Markle’s life and career, Blazing Figures is based on Markle’s copious personal notes and numerous interviews with his family, friends, colleagues, and former students. This snapshot of Canadian cultural history will be of interest to scholars of art history, Aboriginal studies, and Canadian studies as well as the general reader.