Bringing alive in all their horrifying glory seven infernos that changed Americans’ sense of identity and brought entire urban areas to the brink — from a 1760 Boston fire to the 1967 Detroit fire to 9/11, with others in between — historian Hoffer will make you keep sniffing the air in search of smoke. Winningly, he weaves the well-researched personal accounts of survivors and witnesses into larger contexts entailing the evolution of firefighting and great shifts in economy and consciousness. Intriguing too, even for nongeeks, is the actual science: those alchemies of fuel, heat and oxygen (“a wonderful servant, but a tyrannous master”) that turn steel as soft as boiled spaghetti, and make human skin go from red to black to literally melting. We anthropomorphize fires, Hoffer notes, because they kill and destroy like little else — yet they have no motive and aren’t really “evil.” He deserves bonus points for covering 9/11 without implying that it was an inside job: that’s the sick hobbyhorse of far too many authors and academics today.
Grade: A