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In 1982 Stephen J. Pyne published Fire in America , a book that served notice that the history of wildfire was a topic worthy of consideration, and that the topic had found its author. Pyne, an elite wildland firefighter for fifteen seasons, understood fire in ways that no archival research could impart. Fire in America launched Pyne’s career and sent him on a journey, both figurative and literal, across the globe. Since then, he has published a suite of histories of fire around the world and now returns his attention to the United States in a new cultural history of fire covering the last half-century. The book is welcomed and the work solid, but with a couple of caveats. It is not until the afterword that Pyne offers the caveats. (Why these are not mentioned up front is mystifying.) First, it is not intended to be a comprehensive institutional history of fire management but a national survey. Of the two critical institutions participating in what Pyne calls the fire revolution—the reintroduction of fire into the landscape—Pyne says his history emphasizes the U.S. Forest Service because it was and is a major player, and its history provides a natural narrative arc; the other institution, the National Park Service, already has its own book-length administrative history. Despite the Forest Service’s dominant position, largely because it had the dedicated staff researching and fighting fire and exercised leadership from the early twentieth century until the Reagan administration’s drastic budget cuts stalled policy reform, Pyne does not overemphasize the agency’s import at the expense of others. Rather, Pyne moves fairly fluidly between the many players: federal and state agencies, the researchers and land managers at the Tall Timbers Research Station who started the fire revolution in the early 1960s, and other nongovernment organizations and industry players.