Summit County Library & Park City Library present One Book One Community 2025 - Fire Weather by John Vaillant
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION
“Grips like a philosophical thriller, warns like a beacon, and shocks to the core.” —Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland
Fire Weather looks at the 2016 wildfire that devastated Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier. With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, John Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun (from publisher’s description).
In 2021, 8,000 residents near Pinebrook were evacuated from their homes as the Parleys Canyon Fire threatened to spread over the hill. Fortunately, no structures were lost, but it was nonetheless a harrowing four days that left 541 acres burned. In September 2024, the Yellow Lake Fire started about 10 miles from Francis in Wasatch County and burned about 33,000 acres. Further from Summit County, the Southern California wildfires hit in January 2025 and caused tens of billions of dollars in damages and the loss of many lives. Given the local impact of events like these, the One Book One Community committee felt the topics addressed in Fire Weather are timely and relevant for our community to discuss.
The ebook and audiobook of Fire Weather are available on Libby and we have multiple copies of the book available to check out at all of our branches.
KPCW Book Review of Fire Weather by Dan Compton
KPCW, June 3 - Summit County Library talks One Book One Community
KPCW, June 9 - Extreme fire danger prompts Summit County fire restrictions
Park Record, June 25 - ‘Fire Weather’ aims to spark conversations for Park City’s One Book, One Community program
KUTV News, July 15 - Firewise Landscaping with J. Bradley Washa
TownLift, July 22 - “One Book, One Community” wraps up with timely focus on wildfires
Meet the Author - John Vaillant
John Vaillant will speak to the community on Tuesday, July 29th at 7:00 p.m. in the Jim Santy Auditorium at the Park City Library (1255 Park Ave., Park City, UT 84060). There will be a book signing after the presentation with books available to purchase provided by Dolly's Bookstore.
John Vaillant is an author and freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and the Guardian, among others. His first book, The Golden Spruce (Norton, 2005), was a bestseller and won several awards, including the Governor General's and Rogers Trust awards for non-fiction (Canada). His second nonfiction book, The Tiger (Knopf, 2010), was an international bestseller, and has been published in 16 languages. Film rights were optioned by Brad Pitt’s film company, Plan B. In 2014 Vaillant won the Windham-Campbell Prize, a global award for non-fiction. In 2015, he published his first work of fiction, The Jaguar's Children (Houghton Mifflin), which was long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC and Kirkus Fiction Prizes, and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (Canada). His latest book is the 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in General Nonfiction, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (Knopf, 2023).
One Book One Community is supported by Friends of the Park City Library, Friends of the Summit County Library, Dolly’s Bookstore, and Pendry Park City.