The Seattle Times, and The Drift. Thomas is a Marshall Scholar with graduate degrees from the University of Cambridge and Durham University. He is currently a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California.
Thomas applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World, with the following results:
From page 99:Learn more about When It All Burns at the Riverhead Books website.“And so we waited, hoping for an initial attack. An initial attack, or IA, is the zenith of fire suppression operations, allowing us to be the first crew on the fire’s edge. “That’s what hotshot’s live for,” Scheer told me.If readers open to page 99, they’ll get a strong sense of the book’s overall approach. I move between close-up scenes of life on a hotshot crew—its rhythms, language, tensions, and jokes—and wider reflections on fire as an ecological and political force. That pairing is at the heart of the book: the human experience of wildfire nested inside the broader systems that create and respond to it. And I like to slip in cool facts and details—like fire beetles drawn to flames from over a hundred miles away. This, of course, is a metaphor for what we were doing as wildland firefighters who had traveled some 800 miles to be present in the Southwest when the monsoons brought lightning fires. The difference was, we followed the cycle of fire in order to break it.
Then, just when an initial attack seemed a distant dream, when the routine of running and practicing and pranking had softened my nerves, and when it seemed inevitable that we would sulk home as faux heroes— just then, we heard a noise. It started in a high pitch before dropping in frequency, zapping us all like an electric shock coming from the radio in Aoki’s truck. A voice followed the sound, announcing a lighting fire in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests. Within thirty seconds, we were gone.* ** *The American West is full of pyrophiles, or fire lovers— species of plants, animals, and fungi whose existence depends upon their ability to follow ignitions. Of these species, the fire beetle is perhaps the most tenacious. These beetles are black, the size of a fingernail, and are equipped with heat receptors the width of a human hair. Their receptors hold liquid that expands when absorbing radiant heat, allowing the beetles to detect flames from over one hundred miles away. Wildfires act like magnets, pulling the beetles in swarms of millions, where they mate amid the flames, waxy bellies dispelling heat as they bore into charred wood to lay their eggs. In California in the 1940s, football games were occasionally disrupted when the collective embers of spectators’ cigarettes attracted beetles that, finding—"
As the fire season progresses and the fires grow more dangerous and difficult, the interplay between lived experience and broader context deepens. The book sinks into the historical forces and power structures that have made 21st-century fire so violent—centuries of suppression policy, colonial land management, and extractive economic systems. At the same time, I keep the story grounded in my crew and our lives on the fireline, where humor, banter, and friendship coexist with exhaustion, stress, and absurdity. That balance is the rhythm of the book, just as it was the rhythm of the fire season.
--Marshal Zeringue
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