Description
"The fierce and arresting debut memoir of a firefighter navigating the constraints of what it means to be female-bodied in a male-dominated industry, Hotshot is a timely reckoning with both the personal and environmental dangers of wildland firefighting. A nineteen-year-old wild child desperate to find direction, River Selby applied on a whim to be a wildland firefighter. Two years later, they joined an elite class of specially trained wildland firefighters known as hotshots. Over the course of five fire seasons, Selby delves into the world of the people-almost entirely men-who risk their lives to fight and sometimes prevent wildfires. Simultaneously hypervisible and invisible, Selby navigated an odd mix of camaraderie and rampant sexism on the job and, when they challenged it, a violent closing of ranks that excluded them from the work they'd come to love. Drawing on their firsthand experience on the frontlines of fire, Selby demonstrates how a hundred years of misguided suppression-based fire policy are now intersecting with climate change to give us fire seasons of unprecedented duration and severity. Hotshot provides readers with new insight into fire, the people who fight it, and the diversity of ecosystems that comprise the American outdoors"--