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(More customer reviews)Thanks to Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, I have no need to climb Everest. Thanks to Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, I do not have to go long-line swordfish fishing in the Grand Banks during hurricane season. Now, with equal gratitude to Murry Taylor, I have been purged of any desire to parachute into a destructive wall of raging flame in western Alaska armed with nothing more than rope, shovels and a Pulaski axe. (Actually, Taylor also jumped into fire zones carrying a dog-eared copy of Lonesome Dove and a plastic-bottled fifth of Jack Daniels.) Jumping Fire: A Smokejumper's Memoir of Fighting Wildfire describes the life and work of the most venerable Alaskan smokejumper and the other crew with whom he risked his life regularly in the hot Alaskan summers. It is, on the surface, as gripping a work as the other authors' in its description of the excitement, danger, and backbreakingly hard work of line firefighting. But it also describes the life trajectory of one blue-collar American in the latter half of the twentieth century. Taylor, who comes across as a modest but candid Renaissance man, reflects on why he went to the wilderness and why he stayed. His has been a life alternating between keen loneliness and rollicking battlefield camaraderie. His tone in describing all this is one of equal parts humor, romanticism, melancholy, and a wry realism. At one point, Taylor bestows on another oldtimer colleague the accolade that he was "truer to his core nature than any man I've ever known." That description would just as readily suit the author. Besides being a heckuva writer with a gripping story to tell, Murry Taylor sounds like a man the reader would like to meet.
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