- Hardcover: 208 pages
- Publisher: St. Martin's Press; First Edition edition (Aug 11 2000)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0312261284
- ISBN-13: 978-0312261283
- Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 14.7 x 2.1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 413 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,013,650 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Rockmaster Three may have sung "The roof is on fire," but it's no party to be in a burning buildingAand no picnic to find out how fires started or to catch those who set them. London-based journalist Faith (Black Box; Mayday) has made a specialty of disaster-detectives: his taut new volume chronicles fire investigators, the professionals who determine the probable cause and course of a dangerous fire after it has been put out. Faith devotes a chapter to a 1985 casino fire in Puerto Rico, in which modern materials scientists collaborated with old-fashioned cops: present-day fire investigation, Faith explains, dates from that event. Another chapter treats other conflagrations, in the London Underground and in Dublin's Stardust disco. Faith examines the origins of and flaws in fire codes, and the surprising causes of several blazes. He devotes several chapters to arson and arsonistsAincluding to Seattle's still-mysterious late-'80s blazes set with rocket fuel and to a Philadelphia tire fire near I-95, set by a ring of teenage serial arsonists. A series of California blazes turned out, disturbingly, to be the work of a professional fire investigator, who actually wroteAand sent to a publisherAa "fact-based" novel detailing his crimes. Finally, Faith examines evacuations: how might planners understand what people do when inside a building on fire, and how might designers help them escape? Faith has picked an intrinsically riveting topic, one that combines police work, physics, design and the social sciences. Half John McPhee, half Law & Order, his book is very hard to put down. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this new work, journalist and television writer Faith looks at fire and arson investigators as well as their investigations. Drawing on both research and a series of interviews he conducted, he chronicles how fires are investigated and examines such large fires as the one that consumed Las Vegas's MGM Grand Hotel in 1980, killing 84 people and injuring 679. Unfortunately, Faith's tendency to include lengthy quotations from interviews and other sources make this short work very difficult to read. It is extremely disjointed and could have used tighter editing. Worst of all, he has taken a topic of great possible interest and made it very dull reading. Recommended only where there is considerable interest in the topic.AWilfred Drew, SUNY at Morrisville Lib.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
It is now over thirty years since, as a forensic scientist, I attended my first fire scene. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
It is now over thirty years since, as a forensic scientist, I attended my first fire scene. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
A suprisingly good read,
By
This review is from: Blaze: The Forensics of Fire (Hardcover)
I was a little worried as I began this book that it would be a boring list of fire science facts and not much else, I could hardly have been more wrong.While most readers will learn things about how a fire starts spreads and acts Mr. Faith handles these details without missing a beat or boring the reader in the slightest."Blaze" uses real life fires, such as the MGM fire in Las Vegas, the Dupont Plazza fire in San Juan Puerto Rico and the Kings Cross underground station fire in London to detail how fires start, how they spread and most suprisingly how people react to a fire that may endanger their life.The strength of this book is in the way Mr. Faith puts it all together. Most of the chapters read liKe a good short mystery novel, Where did the fire start? how did it start? was it arson? if so who set it? why did they set it? Faith takes you step by step through the investigation until all the answers that that can be found are found.Many chapters aslo contain high drama: daring rescues, narrow escapes and all too often tragic and unnessacary loss of life. I highly reccomend this book for all firefighters, fire invesigators, fire buffs or anyone who enjoys reading a good mystery.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good Read,
By Rolling Thunder (Delran, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Blaze: The Forensics of Fire (Hardcover)
Very informative book. Needed to list more details of the actual forensics of fire and how it acts.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Pretty good, with minor editing and proofreading errors,
By
This review is from: Blaze: The Forensics of Fire (Hardcover)
It was a pretty good overview of fire investigations. I was bothered by proofreading errors.Readers of chapter 3 (p34) strained to understand how a fire could creep along a low incline rather than flame upward. They were told this was due to the "...so-called colander effect, whereby jets stick to walls." If they were imagining some sort of sieve, they were mislead. The effect which causes fluid jets to bend around gentle curves is properly called the Coanda effect, named after a hydraulics theoretician. A few other minor errors like a "Kray-2" supercomputer mar the account, which is otherwise good reading. I was happy to see a chapter discounting the widespread belief that crowds of people tend to panic in fires.
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