Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself [Paperback]

"This is a book about the deleterious effects of maintaining professional silence regarding one’s own traumatic experiences. Burning Down the House may be an act of exorcism for its troubled author, but it is also a compellingly candid, incendiary narrative of emotional and mental decline." (Quill & Quire)

"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." (National Post)

"Burning Down the House is such a raw book, one that lays bare both terrible moments in time and the author's own unravelling. Over and over, he breaks down a blaze or a crash, probing its anatomy, its beginning and its end. This is a cautionary tale, one you might want to give to a teenager newly licensed to drive, or to a man who thinks he drives better with a few beers under his belt, or a woman who has removed the batteries from the smoke detector because it goes off when she fries bacon. I was left with a powerful sense of just how fragile the human body is, how vulnerable to tons of metal and rubber moving along at 120 kilometres an hour, how sometimes nefarious in nature is the "red devil" called fire. Accidents portrayed on film and television somehow seem neater, certainly quieter. Crash victims don't scream all the while they're being rescued, but some do in this book. If I thought "the jaws of life" always get that trapped driver out quickly, I don't think that any more. I would have wished for even more from the author on the actual physics of fire, while the material on his personal torments (the doubting, self-loathing and self-absorption) was almost too much to bear. But when Wangersky is rushing to the scene of a house in flames or to carnage on a dark county road, he is an all-senses-charged witness with an unerring eye for detail. In this haunting meditation on fate and chance, he literally takes you there." (Globe & Mail)

Russell Wangersky's most recent book, The Glass Harmonica, won the 2010 BMO Winterset Award and was longlisted for the Relit Awards. His previous book, Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself won Canada's largest non-fiction prize, the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the Rogers Communications Newfoundland and Labrador Non-Fiction Book Award and the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. It was also a finalist for the Writer's Trust Non-Fiction Prize and was a Globe and Mail Top 100 selection in 2008. His 2006 short story collection The Hour of Bad Decisions was long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, first book, Canada and the Caribbean. It was a Globe and Mail Top 100 selection in 2006. Wangersky lives and works in St. John's, where he is an editor and columnist with the St. John's Telegram.