The Last Fire Season
A Personal and Pyronatural History
Failed to add items
Add to cart failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
New to Audible Prime Member exclusive: 2 credits with free trial
The Last Fire Season
Buy Now for ₹1,131.00
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Manjula Martin
-
Written by:
-
Manjula Martin
About this listen
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A MOST-ANTICIPATED BOOK: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Saturday Evening Post, Poets & Writers, The Millions, Alta, Heat Map News
Told in luminous, perceptive prose, The Last Fire Season is a deeply incisive inquiry into what it really means—now—to live in relationship to the elements of the natural world. When Manjula Martin moved from the city to the woods of Northern California, she wanted to be closer to the wilderness that she had loved as a child. She was also seeking refuge from a health crisis that left her with chronic pain, and found a sense of healing through tending her garden beneath the redwoods of Sonoma County. But the landscape that Martin treasured was an ecosystem already in crisis. Wildfires fueled by climate change were growing bigger and more frequent: each autumn, her garden filled with smoke and ash, and the local firehouse siren wailed deep into the night.
In 2020, when a dry lightning storm ignited hundreds of simultaneous wildfires across the West and kicked off the worst fire season on record, Martin, along with thousands of other Californians, evacuated her home in the midst of a pandemic. Both a love letter to the forests of the West and an interrogation of the colonialist practices that led to their current dilemma, The Last Fire Season, follows her from the oaky hills of Sonoma County to the redwood forests of coastal Santa Cruz, to the pines and peaks of the Sierra Nevada, as she seeks shelter, bears witness to the devastation, and tries to better understand fire’s role in the ecology of the West. As Martin seeks a way to navigate the daily experience of living in a damaged body on a damaged planet, she comes to question her own assumptions about nature and the complicated connections between people and the land on which we live.©2024 Manjula Martin (P)2024 Random House Audio
Critic Reviews
“Powerful . . . This . . . isn’t a hand-wringing chronicle of climate despair. Nor is it a can-do narrative buoyed by inspirational hash tags and techno-optimistic hopes. Martin’s book is at once more grounded and more surprising . . . the range of this book coaxes us to confront our own failures of imagination.”—The New York Times
“The Last Fire Season is a poetic, instructive document for our times. In sharing her experience of new disasters, Martin reveals that our collective challenge in facing climate change is no less than the ancient human condition: to find and create beauty amid pain, to hold at once love and grief.”—Sarah Smarsh, author of Heartland
“This is the kind of natural history writing we need at this most crucial moment. It's precise, granular, and lovely, but it's also engaged, and entirely honest in grappling with change. The shifting baseline of the world around us, not the timeless beauty of the world, is the story of our moment, and it's rarely been better told.”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature