Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, October 24, 1993                   TAG: 9310240194
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: 7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Reviewed by GLENN EMBREY
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

MACLEAN'S MONTANA RISES AGAIN

Though non-fiction, Norman Maclean's "Young Men and Fire" has many of the same qualities found in his earlier novella, "A River Runs Through It." Both are lyrical and elegiac, both celebrate the natural world, both are colored by a sense of tragedy. "Young Men and Fire" is concerned with the

deaths of 13 men very much like the brother the narrator loves and mourns in the earlier work. In 1949, a crew of the Forest Service's elite Smokejumpers - young, fearless, and full of promise - parachuted into the rugged Mann Gulch area of Montana to contain an apparently routine forest fire. Two hours after their jump they found themselves racing for their lives up a steep hillside.

Their dash lasted less than five minutes. During that time, some 30 seconds ahead of the firestorm, the foreman coolly invented what is now known as an "escape fire," setting fire to the dry grass ahead of him. He yelled to his crew to join him in the smoldering area he had just created and to lie face down in the ashes. None did. Two made it unscathed over the crest of the hill into a rocky area and lived, as did the foreman. The rest were killed by the fire.

Were they unable to hear him above the roar of the flames? Had they heard but thought him crazy? Were they in fact burned by the very fire the foreman created, as the father of one of the young men later charged?

In this moving account of these events, we know the outcome of the race by the third sentence of the book. What Maclean loses in suspense, though, he makes up in genuine emotion. The entire book is pervaded by an almost sensuous feeling of sadness. His reconstruction of what happened is full of fascinating detail and asides, and even these are tinged with foreboding and grief.

Maclean's powerlessness to explain why these young men could be allowed to die haunts his meticulous retelling of this story and heightens the book's sense of tragic loss. So do the occasional not-quite-fully-polished spots in this otherwise wonderfully written book, for they are reminders that Maclean himself died before being able to finish the final draft.

\ Glenn Embrey teaches at Radford University