Burning Down the House: Fighting Fire and Losing Myself [Hardcover]

NATIONAL POST-SATURDAY JULY 26, 2008 -------------------------------------- Firefighters silent as their job takes its toll Memoir Robert Wiersema, Weekend Post Published: Saturday, July 26, 2008 BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE BY RUSSELL WANGERSKY --- Most people have a fairly solid image of firefighters as heroic, stalwart, calendar-ready hunks dramatically backlit by flames, occasionally guilty of bad behaviour (excused by their sacrifices). As far as contemporary heroes go, firefighters are pretty much the pinnacle, especially after 9/11. The trouble with this image is that it's almost entirely superficial, with little rooting in the reality of a firefighter's daily existence. And unlike those doctors, nurses, teachers and lawyers who have produced a body of literature exploring the interstices of their professional and personal lives, a firefighter has yet to write the definitive tell-all book about the heroics and, occasionally, heroic failures of the job. Into this void steps Newfoundland writer Russell Wangersky, with a memoir of his eight years as a volunteer firefighter, and the lingering aftermath of those years. It is, at times, a shocking, brave work, the sort of book you sense the author needed to write. Wangersky dreamed of being a firefighter for most of his life, but, as he writes, "what had been a dream became a kind of personal nightmare, as bit by bit the underpinnings of wonder and heroics fell away. I was left with horrors I still live with now, horrors that can, occasionally, sneak up on me when I don't expect them, smashing my confidence and leaving me unable to control my temper or my fears." Organized in a loosely chronological narrative, the book follows Wangersky from the age of 21, when he joins the volunteer fire department in Wolfville, N. S., training and gradually earning his place in the firehall. The narrative gains force and intensity as Wangersky recounts his experiences in the field. This is not the tabloid heroism of the breathless headlines: Wangersky captures the confusion and fear of being inside a burning building as floors suddenly disappear; the tragedies narrowly averted; the sense of shock as the crew struggles to recover the body of a woman from a car crash. Wangersky, a long-time journalist who is now the editor of The Telegram in St. John's, handles these scenes with a terse candour, balancing an in-the-moment experiential quality with a keen eye for detail and the larger ramifications of what happens. The heart of the book, though, is in his account of the emotional toll it all takes. Volunteer firefighting is not the sort of job one leaves at the office: You're either waiting for calls that can come at any moment, or reeling in the wake of what has happened, bad or good. Add to that the traditional silence of the department, where one does not talk about the emotional reaction to what one has witnessed, and you have the makings of a breakdown. Wangersky documents hi (National Post )

Published April 24, 2008. Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself Russell Wangersky (Thomas Allen) Certain professions are overly romanticized in popular television and film---does the world need another canoodling medical drama or corrupt cop flick? The best in those genres, like The Wire, are written by those who have actually done the job. Russell Wangersky's book about his years spent as a volunteer firefighter, first in Wolfville and then Newfoundland, is so cinematically vivid---you can almost smell acrid, toxic smoke and imagine human pulp on the highway---that I wouldn't be surprised if it turns up on the big screen one day (at a minimum, anyone considering the profession must read this). As editor of the St. Johns Telegram and a Giller nominee for The Hour of Bad Decisions, Wangersky makes an ideal storyteller. He writes with a self-awareness not often achieved in these autobiographies. But what makes Burning Down the House remarkable is Wangersky's brave admission of post-traumatic stress disorder: Not only does he fight fires, but he battles nightmares, daytime visions, phantom odours and "memories that unroll in my head like movies I can't walk away from." Yet, theres a longing in his words like a recovering addict (the real deal, not the James Frey sort) who, if asked, would don that uniform once again. Sue Carter Flinn (The Coast-Halifax )

May 8th, 2008 Burning Down the House Hot damn Melora Koepke Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself, by Russell Wangersky (Thomas Allen), 271 pp. Ex-firefighter Russell Wangersky mines the glowing embers of his mind and produces an affecting tale Russell Wangersky's memoir, Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself, is a book that would not be written by most firefighters. There are taboos about talking about what you see, with your brothers or your families, let alone a reading public. You cannot talk about what nobody talks about, especially the nagging uncertainty about whether you even helped, or what it means to help, or whether there is any help to give. Nobody is supposed to remember things this well, the fires and accident scenes and injuries and deaths they've seen over the course of their years as a volunteer firefighter. But of course - and this is the first secret that Wangersky reveals - they do. At least Wangersky does, in searing, clear, torturous detail. One suspects his ultra-precise writer's eye for surveying detail and analyzing situations contributed to his skill as a firefighter (he was twice voted Firefighter of the Year by the brotherhood) as well as to the post-traumatic stress syndrome that finally dismantled his self, his sanity and his ability to live his own day-to-day life. Wangersky, the editor-in-chief of the St-John's Telegram who began volunteer firefighting in the Maritimes as a 20-year-old with an honours degree in philosophy, relates, with patient precision, what it's like to be the first on the scene for countless unimaginable human tragedies, and for these kinds of events to be exactly the opposite of "unimaginable." They are in fact ever present in Wangersky's imagination; his waking hours and sleep have both been constantly interrupted by hallucinations and nightmares of accidents, injuries and deaths unfolding again and again. His renderings of long-ago events are carved into the page so sharply and baroquely that readers will almost see them as he does, and as though they had also been there. Wangersky's first book, a collection of short stories entitled The Hour of Bad Decisions, was long-listed for the Giller and Commonwealth Writers' Prizes, and here he is describing his own life. The images are so well rendered, in fact, that the prose might call attention to itself, if it was something else that was being written about. But the fact is that Wangersky has such a story to tell us that the tightly controlled, occasionally extravagant writing only serves to send the point home. Certainly, there is material here for readers curious about what fire can do to a house, or a person trapped inside, or about the mechanics of removing someone's twisted limbs from a car or a piece of farm equipment. But Wangersky has created a strange, effective structure for his memories. In chapters about various scenes, fires and victims he has seen, has helped or not helped, he is mapping the landscape of his own mind, looking for a way through. (C.B.C. TV-The Hour )

Reflections of a volunteer firefighter July 12, 2008 Veronica Ross BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE: FIGHTING FIRES AND LOSING MYSELF by Russell Wangersky, (Thomas Allen, 271 pages, $32.95 hardcover) Russell Wangersky, editor of The Telegram newspaper in St. John's, NL, was 21 when he became a volunteer firefighter in Wolfville, N.S. It was the beginning of almost 20 years of fighting fires, going to accident scenes and attending medical emergencies that led eventually to this memoir, a riveting account of the work that firefighters everywhere do. Wangersky had been fascinated with firefighting as a boy -- there was a fire station just blocks from his Halifax home -- but becoming a firefighter then seemed an unattainable dream as he wore glasses and was small for his age. Being small, however, would later allow him to work in tight corners inaccessible to larger men. And poor eyesight was a plus as he was used to not depending on his eyes. As a firefighter in Nova Scotia, he writes, he saw a dead person for the first time -- an elderly woman who suffered a fatal stroke while driving after having her hair done. Wangsesrky found the work thrilling and later, after moving to Newfoundland, he joined a rural fire department there. "Fighting fires and going to accident scenes is a sensory wonder, the most amazing and visceral experience anyone could ask for," he writes. Yet the constant exposure to danger left him with "a dream that became a personal nightmare." Even before he left Nova Scotia, he writes, he would wake up from nightmares with a pounding heart. In Newfoundland, he continued with the fire department while working for a newspaper. His pager would go off in the newsroom, or at a family dinner, and Wangersky would rush off, ready to deal with a burning building, a highway crash, or to perform CPR. The fires and accidents went on and on and the victims inhabited his dreams. He often wondered if he had done enough to help them. He quit when he was 40, but today the horrors still affect him, he says. Wangersky is a skilled writer. His 2006 short story collection, The Hour of Bad Decisions, was on a longlist for the Giller Prize and on the shortlist for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize. His sensitivity and honesty make this new book unforgettable. Veronica Ross of Kitchener is the author of numerous works of fiction as well as the biography, To Experience Wonder: Edna Staebler: A Life. (The Record (Waterloo) )

Thousands of boys dream of becoming firefighters. Some get the chance, and for some of those, the dream becomes a nightmare. "Burning Down the House" is the story of Wangersky’s eight-year career as a volunteer firefighter, an experience that wound up reaching into every facet of his life and changed the way he saw the world forever. Written in vibrant, luminous prose, the book traces his years from rookie to veteran firefighter and the toll it took on his personal life. Offering a rare glimpse into physical dangers and psychological costs of trying to save strangers’ lives, Wangersky paints a harrowing and sometimes heartbreakingly vivid portrait of the fires, medical calls and automobile accidents that are the standard fare of the profession. Visceral and affecting, "Burning Down the House" is an insightful insider’s account of the perilous world of firefighting and an unforgettable memoir of how, in finding his passion, Wangersky lost himself.