REREADS FOR 2025
Published in the February 1, 2025 edition.
After staring at my bookshelves for the past month, I have finally decided which three books I want to reread in 2025. Each new year I try to revisit a new group of books that on first reading sparked something or made an impression or otherwise caught my attention. It’s a different list each year, based on current affairs and other considerations. So here we go with the reread recommendations for 2025.
With the LA wildfires still smoldering, it seemed appropriate to dive back into “The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt & The Fire that Saved America,” by Timothy Egan. This is a detail-rich, almost moment by moment saga of the raging, wind-driven wildfire that burned about 3 million acres of forest land and numerous towns in Washington, Idaho and Montana. The fire struck in August of 1910, before forest fires got named, and to this day the conflagration is simply called The Big Burn. The story of the firestorm and the overmatched men of the relatively new US Forest Service reads like a combo adventure story and disaster movie. The details are rich, from the condition of the drought-stricken forests to the massive wind storms to the hurried evacuation of towns in the fire’s path to the aftermath.
A nice aside is the story of Ed Pulaski, the Forest Ranger who crafted in his home blacksmith shop the Pulaski, a unique firefighting tool combining a mattock (sort of a spade) and an ax, which is still the go-to hand tool of wildland firefighters today. During the fire, Pulaski was hailed as a hero for saving the lives of 40 firefighters by sheltering them in a mine as the fire swept over their position.
Equally intense was how President Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, maneuvered in Washington and through Congress to create the US Forest Service. In an oversimplified nutshell, the Forest Service was pitched as a way to secure vast amounts of timber on public land for harvesting by timber companies and whose Forest Rangers would serve as an army of firefighters pledging to put out “forest fires” as soon as possible to “save the timber.” That’s a little snarky; there’s plenty more about the relationship between those two conservation heroes and the philosophy behind preserving land for the public.
Sticking with the natural world, next is “Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Explain Everything About the World,” by Tim Marshall. I picked it up thinking, “sort of oversold the premise, pal.” I was wrong. As one reviewer noted, the book “shows how geography shapes not just history but destiny.” China and Russia are somewhat obvious examples of how a nation’s land mass and other geographic features shape its culture, politics and economy. I was, however, caught a bit off-guard by Marshall’s premise of how the United States became a world power and economic powerhouse.
The shopworn story of America’s extraordinary growth into a dominant world power is usually driven by the famed “great man theory,” which posits that men of talent, integrity and foresight drive history and events and shape the world. Our founding fathers certainly had all those attributes and passion, along with solid philosophical underpinnings. But all that would have been shoved into the dust bin of history if the US would have never secured one river.
In 1803, the US was a new, smallish country whose land was limited to the Eastern seaboard, bits of the Midwest and the South. That year, President Thomas Jefferson made an audacious deal: he pulled off the Louisiana Purchase, giving France $15 million in cash and the US a future. The land deal doubled the size of the US. It was a land mass equivalent in size to modern day Spain, Italy, France, the UK and Germany. Combined. The key, however, was the Mississippi River and its huge drainage. The massive drainage has “more miles of navigable river than the rest of the world combined.” The Mississippi and its tributaries allowed the US to conduct trade and travel from the Rockies to Canada to the Gulf
of Mexico. It is “the greatest inland water transport route in the world.” The Mississippi was “the jewel in the crown” that spurred the young nation to become a continental power.
So, my interpretation: a great swath of fertile land and a great river meant the “great men” had to just stay out of the way.
Finally, a serious gut-punch: “Cotton Tenants: Three Families,” by James Agee, a poet, screenwriter and Pulitzer Prize winner, with photos by Walker Evans, an editor at both Time and Fortune magazines. This is a brutal, intensely reported factual examination of poverty in Alabama, circa 1936, seen through the lives of three white families, all “tenants” who rent or sharecrop cotton fields for a living. It’s almost hard to imagine or picture the lack of basic amenities and daily life essentials all three families faced. Food is rough and boring: eggs, sorghum, biscuits, some fatback or pork, bread, and whatever vegetables are grown in a garden. The homes are ramshackle and barely livable. Cash is almost non-existent. The photos are haunting. The parents look aged and worn, even though they are in their 30s and 40s. The kids are barefoot, dirty and plentiful. Everyone works.
This slight volume is a condensed version (just 30,000 words) of Agee and Evans’ landmark 1941 book, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” named one of the most “influential books of the 20th century.” That work started as a magazine assignment for Fortune magazine. After both men’s deaths, the notes and manuscript of the magazine story, which was assumed to be lost, were found and published as “Cotton Tenants,” with 30 of Evans’ photos. Their work, “shattered journalistic and literary conventions” and has been called, “one of the most honest explorations of poverty in America and … a foundational document of long-form reporting.”
Those three should keep me occupied for a while.
Jon Klusmire of Bishop is pretty sure quite a few folks would suggest he also reread and embrace “Dialogues with Silence” by Trappist Monk Thomas Merton.
