Review: Junger's 'Fire' burns with energy

"Fire"
By Sebastian Junger
W.W. Norton
Non-fiction/Journalism
256 pages

(CNN) -- With his thoughtful, swaggering literary demeanor, the swarthy journalist Sebastian Junger is part-writer, part-adventurer and -- if "Fire" is any indication -- part-prophet as well.

"Fire," a collection of short pieces, reprises some of Junger's dangerous assignments of the last decade. Some of these articles have appeared originally in magazines, Vanity Fair and Men's Journal among them. His subjects include firefighters in the western United States, ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, diamond traders in Sierra Leone and -- pre-September 11 -- the fighters in Afghanistan.

These stories are woven together loosely, vastly different from each other. But they all are themed on people's experiences when they confront situations that could destroy them.

Heroism and irony

The first chapter, "Fire," follows firefighters battling the 1994 South Canyon blaze in western Colorado. It killed 14 people. Mixing a diary-style account of how "hotshots" are dropped from helicopters into the eye of the blaze, Junger studies the dynamics of spreading wildfires, as he explored the oceanic and weather phenomena behind his 1997 "The Perfect Storm."

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Here, a format of play-by-play prose usually works for Junger; at times the reader can almost feel the heat emanating from the blaze. But in places, his fondness for textbook descriptions stifles the emotion and color that could otherwise penetrate the reader's psyche.

Nevertheless, given the attention drawn by the firefighting profession in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Junger's spotlight on these workers now looks prescient. As he writes in the book, what firefighters do is heroism in purest form.

Yet irony rarely eludes these men, he writes. It's the nature of firefighting that calamity means job security. Listening to a conversation between the South Canyon workers, Junger notes their mixed emotions. "They wanted to have a good, productive summer," he writes.

Another of Junger's stories concerns an American's chilling escape from guerrilla kidnappers in the mountains of Kashmir. Again, the experience appears to have foreshadowed current events: The story makes today's reader think of the recent kidnap and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was killed by Pakistani militants.

And in his final chapter, Junger journeys to the battlefields of Afghanistan, where he meets with Northern Alliance military leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, assassinated on September 9. Junger praises Massoud for helping to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan and keeping the Taliban at bay -- as well as holding the fractious Northern Alliance together.

Going out of his way

Junger is ultimately an adventurer, and he advocates what many would consider an extreme life.

"For vast numbers of Americans, as life has become staggeringly easy, it has also become vaguely unfulfilling," he writes. "Life in modern society is designed to eliminate as many unforeseen events as possible and as inviting as that seems, it leaves us hopelessly underutilized.

"For the rest of us, threats to our safety and comfort have been so completely wiped out that we have to go out of our way to create them."

Junger first encountered success as a journalist when a tree-climbing accident led him to a fascination with dangerous jobs. He became fascinated by people who willingly risk their lives for their professions.

"Fire" indicates that as much as he enjoys writing about them, Junger is one of them, too. Although his writing can be uneven, it's almost always immediate.