“When It All Burns” by Jordan Thomas

c.2025, Riverhead Books, $30, 350 pages

Don’t touch!

You tell a toddler that something’s hot, don’t touch, a dozen times but you know they’ve got to learn it on their own. The lesson is set when they put fingers to the fire and ouch. That’s how many of us learn to steer clear of flames while, as in the new book “When It All Burns” by Jordan Thomas, some heroes rush toward it.

In the summer of 2020, with a fresh new graduate degree in hand and a solid relationship in his life, Jordan Thomas left the Midwest to move to California. There, he planned to dive into a doctorate degree in anthropology at the University of California Santa Barbara, where he wanted to learn more about large fires in human history. Almost coincidentally, fighting fires was “a way to pay the rent.”

He didn’t admit that to anyone when he applied for training. The money, as he learned, wasn’t the point anyway.

Early in this new career, Thomas often heard about the hotshots, an elite group of front-of-the-line firefighters who seemed fearless, and he was intrigued. Despite that hotshots weren’t paid as well as their city-employee brethren, their Olympian-level athleticism and their reputation appealed to him. Job security was nonexistent, as was company insurance, while the chances of danger were off the charts. The job interview, a long, timed “walk” up a steep hill didn’t deter him. And so, for six months, Thomas became a hotshot.

During that time, he learned some of what he’d set out to know.

Long before Europeans came to California, Native people there understood controlled burning and how it helped to avoid large-scale conflagrations. White settlers, he says, ignored ancient practices, enslaved the Natives, and fought all fires instead. Over time, climate change made things worse, and a danger to humans, wildlife, and giant national-treasure trees.

Says Thomas, about the sequoias, “It was easy to forget that, in their two hundred million years of life, they had never inhabited a planet like the one we have created.”

In the first many pages of “When It All Burns,” it may sometimes seem that the author is playing it cool as he tells his story. It’s factual and straightforward for a while, like that of any journey taken to land an unusual job, to fit in, and impress the coworkers – but then heart-pounding cracks in the veneer start to show. There’s a well-earned bit of swagger here, and an irresistible camaraderie with other hotshots but as pages pass, Thomas writes alarmingly of risk, exhaustion, menace, and a growing sense of fear on two fronts: One, for himself. The other, for the planet.

Fighting fire with fire, as it turns out, is not just an overused phrase. It’s a real but ancient method of turning down the heat on the Earth, saving flora, fauna, homes, and lives – something Thomas prods us to fully understand, and soon.

“When It All Burns” is great for adventurous readers, true thriller seekers, or anyone concerned about wildfires and climate change. You’ll cringe, and you’ll be enflamed.