| Book Review | Environmental History, 14.1

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 14.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Awful Splendour: A Fire History of Canada. By Stephen J. Pyne. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2008. xxix + 549 pp. Illustrations, maps, figures, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $85.00, paper $34.95.

Ever since the publication of Fire in America (Princeton, 1982; Washington, 1997), we have suffered a noticeable gap in our understanding of fire in North America because the continent's largest country was ignored. With Awful Splendour, Steve Pyne addresses that lacunae in a way that complements and complicates his previous work. This latest book is another ambitious survey of fire's impact on nature and its relationship to human culture, and the two studies amount to a sweeping examination of the role of fire in shaping North American environmental history. In other ways, though, these books diverge sharply as a result of key differences in national history. While the United States created coherence in wildland fire because of the dominance of federal agencies in land management, Canadian fire history fissioned due to the tensions between Dominion and provincial sovereignty, the complexity of ecological geography, and the irreconcilable demands among varied constituencies which shaped this text. That Pyne handles these centrifugal forces as well as he does is a tribute to his patience as much as his scholarship, but the book is nevertheless something of a brilliant mess.

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