Fire

By Sebastian Junger
Norton, $24.95
ISBN 0393010465

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After the storm, comes the fire

Sebastian Junger's 1997 debut The Perfect Storm was a publishing phenomenon. The real-life thriller sold more than 2.5 million copies, and the subsequent movie created a box-office tsunami.

Instead of taking advantage of his newfound fame, Junger went back to his roots as a freelance writer, traipsing the globe to the unglamorous locations that fed his love of danger. "I know what safety is, and it's completely unappealing to me," he told the Web site ArtsFirst. "It makes me feel like I'm already 60 years old."

Now those disparate assignments are assembled in Fire, a collection of 10 pieces of reportage previously published in magazines like Harper's, Vanity Fair and Outside.

After a serious injury during his days as a tree-cutter, Junger became fascinated by the inherent risks of some professions and decided to write a book on the subject. He followed smoke jumpers in Idaho (profiled in the title story "Fire") and spent time with the last living harpooner ("The Whale Hunters"). He never did write the book -- a little story about the swordfishermen on the Andrea Gail got in the way -- but a common theme runs through Fire, which Junger describes as "people confronting situations that could easily destroy them."

Whereas there were no survivors to help re-create the sea tragedy in The Perfect Storm, the situation is different in these stories. Here we meet the people directly involved: diamond smugglers in Sierra Leone, kidnapped hostages in Kashmir and a brilliant guerilla strategist in Afghanistan.

In the first two pieces, Junger details the physics of fire and the tactics used against it. He vividly recounts the 1994 horror on Colorado's Storm King Mountain, where 10 men and four women were out-raced by flames in the most lethal U.S. forest fire in more than half a century.

An absorbing chapter titled "The Forensics of War" deals with the collection of evidence in Kosovo to corroborate war crimes charges against Bosnian Serb leaders. Junger proves to be a superb teacher as he explains the wizardry of forensics teams seeking to identify victims from body parts.

Chasing the exciting stories that he says make him feel alive, Junger turns unlikely subjects into fascinating reading. It's what we expect from superior journalists, and Junger delivers abundantly.