Fire!: The 100 Most Devastating Fires and the Heroes Who Fought Them

Hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanoes are disasters consigned to particular regions of the globe and can be mapped accordingly. Building fires, by contrast, can happen anywhere at any time. Hotels, night clubs, schools and factories are all vulnerable to this danger. It takes little time to turn a pleasant day into a deadly inferno. Goodman's book is as good a place as any to begin exploring fire calamities. It starts with London in 1666 and ends with Austria's ski lift tragedy in 2000. Most of the major fires in those 300 years, including the Coconut Grove and Triangle Shirtwaist, are included. As with many books of this kind, there is little text, and each story is covered through photos, captions and insets. But it is put together in a most attractive manner, likely to grab the interest of everyone. Toward the end, the photos are all in color. The biggest drawback here is that the author selected American and British fires almost exclusively. The Blitz of 1940 is included, for instance, but not Hamburg or Dresden, worse hit. Pearl Harbor is here, but not Hiroshima. The great San Francisco earthquake and fire can be found, but not Tokyo's firestorm of 1923. If one is not concerned with this, by all means get a copy for your collection.

Informative book on the tradgedies of FIRE. This book is interesting in that it touches on many different fires from our past and gives important information on each, without being boring. Great pictures and lots of details of who, what, where and when. This book is written in such a way that you can pick it up at any time and spend as much time as you have, and still feel like you have learned something and been part of it.