Fire can fascinate, inspire, capture the imagination and bring families and communities together. It has the ability to amaze, energise and touch something deep inside all of us. For thousands of years, at every corner of the globe, humans have been huddling around fires: from the basic and primitive essentials of light, heat, energy and cooking, through to modern living, fire plays a central role in all of our lives. The ability to accurately and quickly light a fire is one of the most important skills anyone setting off on a wilderness adventure could possess, yet very little has been written about it. Through his narrative Hume also meditates on the wider topics surrounding fire and how it shapes the world around us.

Setting Fires is the gripping story of Annie Fishman Waldmas, a documentary filmmaker, wife, and mother of two young children, who uses her professional skills to unravel the shocking secrets behind the two fires that come to dominate and haunt her life. The novel begins with a pair of phone calls that shatter Annie's contentment forever. The first brings news that Annie's country house in Connecticut has burned, in an area where two other Jewish-owned buildings have also recently burned down. The second and far more distressing call informs Annie that her beloved father -- the family patriarch, burdened by a lifelong shame that Annie will soon uncover -- has been diagnosed with cancer. Gradually, as Annie and her father forge a new and closer bond, he is able to acknowledge his history of poverty, his struggle for survival, and the near-tragedy it led to. Annie's determination to help her father find peace and forgiveness before dying meshes inextricably with her determination to find and expose the anti-Semitic arsonist who threatens her own family. Annie's passionate search reaches back four generations from the early roots of the Fishman clan in Russia and New York to the modern-day lives of Annie, her siblings, and their divorced parents. At the same time, it throws Annie's relationships with her own husband and children into chaos, and rocks the family life on which she has always depended for stability and support. Not until Annie discovers and resolves the final truths -- by her own wit, perseverance, and self-knowledge -- can she reestablish the harmony she treasures. Kate Wenner, an award-winning former producer of 20/20, makes a startling fiction debut in this powerful novel about a courageous woman's struggle to come to terms with a complex family history.

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • In this magisterial study of the relationship between illness and art, the best-selling author of An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison, brings an entirely fresh understanding to the work and life of Robert Lowell (1917-1977), whose intense, complex, and personal verse left a lasting mark on the English language and changed the public discourse about private matters. In his poetry, Lowell put his manic-depressive illness (now known as bipolar disorder) into the public domain, and in the process created a new and arresting language for madness. Here Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison brings her expertise in mood disorders to bear on Lowell’s story, illuminating not only the relationships between mania, depression, and creativity but also how Lowell’s illness and treatment influenced his work (and often became its subject). A bold, sympathetic account of a poet who was—both despite and because of mental illness—a passionate, original observer of the human condition.

This book helps adults to understand firesetting behaviour in children and teens and provides strategies to work with them to address the behaviour. Drawing upon the latest juvenile firesetting research and utilising child development theory to underpin its safety messages, the book explores why young people might set fires in the first place and contextualises firesetting in terms of communication and gaining the attention of carers and other adults. The chapters lay out practical, tried-and-tested steps that professionals and carers can take to address firesetting behaviour, and suggests how to further support any child or teen who sets fires. This includes summaries of the latest evidence-based support strategies and a range of creative activities that can be used in direct work with children and teenagers who set fires, tailored to specific age ranges. Combining expert advice on firesetting behaviour with straightforward practices, this comprehensive book can be used by anyone working with young people to help them intervene and prevent it.

The acclaimed debut novel by the author of Little Fires Everywhere and Our Missing Hearts “A taut tale of ever deepening and quickening suspense.” —O, the Oprah Magazine “Explosive . . . Both a propulsive mystery and a profound examination of a mixed-race family.” —Entertainment Weekly “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.

A trio of former college friends reunite 20 years later to share the stories of their adventures, rivalries, secrets and losses while reevaluating the events of a single night that shaped all of them.

A common stereotype about American Indians is that for centuries they lived in static harmony with nature, in a pristine wilderness that remained unchanged until European colonization. Omer C. Stewart was one of the first anthropologists to recognize that Native Americans made significant impact across a wide range of environments. Most important, they regularly used fire to manage plant communities and associated animal species through varied and localized habitat burning. In Forgotten Fires, editors Henry T. Lewis and M. Kat Anderson present Stewart's original research and insights, written in the 1950s yet still provocative today. Significant portions of Stewart's text have not been available until now, and Lewis and Anderson set Stewart's findings in the context of current knowledge about Native hunter-gatherers and their uses of fire.

House Fires by Jerry Knapp & Chris Flatley provides a practical and comprehensive guide to strategy and tactics to fight house fires. Features and Benefits: --Interactive scenarios based on fireground experience to help develop your fireground decision making --Compilation of the best strategy and tactics for house fires from many experienced fire service experts --Firefighters: critical information, insight, and understanding of strategies you will be expected to execute on the fireground including size up, search/rescue, fire attack, ventilation, and engine and truck operations --Fire officers: scenario-based practical application of traditional and modern approaches to house fires --Students of fire suppression: a comprehensive text including the latest research on our most important alarm Examine and practice what must be done for you to determine how best to develop your strategy and tactics at your most important alarm—the house fire. Use this book as a reference as your career progresses—from firefighter to line officer to chief— after you experience different fire situations. You will gain a deeper understanding from the practical scenarios to improve your decision-making skills.

Poetry. In SETTING THE FIRES by Darlene Pagán, fire is a literal combustion and a hunger that claims both the natural world and the human heart. Whether in the passion between lovers, the wonder of childhood, the threat of violence, or in the seeds of inspiration, fire is an element of loss and destruction necessary for renewal and cleansing. "Oh, Darlene Pagán, where have you been all my reading life with your hard-hitting poems, your luminous words, your insights and mesmerizing cadences, your stories, your quirky visions, your lines so sharp and well- honed they glint like a knife edge as they cut through to the heart, your singular strategies with language, metaphor, with silences and syntax, your way of looking at the world? Here are poems I've been hungering to read, the poet I've been waiting to discover."--Julia Alvarez "A lively sensibility is at work and play in SETTING THE FIRES. Irreverent and fully American, these poems are crackling with irrepressible humor and an eye for the quirky detail. I also admire their clear language and scope of subject matter, from childhood to adulthood, from the personal to the political, they leave a record of a self wide awake to the world."--Dorianne Laux