"Both the scientific world and professionals who work in forestry management view Pyne's seminal Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia (1991) as something between a road map for preventing future disasters and a work of poetry. This follow-up is a hybrid of sorts, adding a new preface and epilogue to a previous sequel with the same title but also including contemporary context to the concepts that were reiterated in the 2006 edition...impressive...More solid work from a fire expert."
--Kirkus Reviews

"[An] eloquent and provocative book".
--Simon Caterson, The Age

"An elegant and passionate contribution to a conversation that's often caught in spin, agendas, fear."
--Ashley Hay, The Bulletin

"The perfect solution will always elude us, but we can reduce the dangers associated with fire and use it to our and the environment's advantage. Pyne has contributed constructively to this urgent debate."
--George Thomas, Coast & Country

"The argument is important, on-going and unresolved; and the book...intended to assist discussion on matters of public interest. Highly recommended."
--A.M. Lucas, University of East Anglia, Reviews in Australian Studies

"Stephen Pyne has written an elegant, provocative and gently persuasive addition to his earlier books. It has the added value of being optimistic and practical over an issue about which many urban Australians fatalistically define as an inevitable periodical scourge."
--Bill Tully, Voice

"No-one has quite synthesized the questions of fire, science, history and society in Australia as Stephen Pyne has done...Stephen Pyne, at his best, is--if not a poet--a beautiful writer. His prose has clarity and passion, filled with knowledge and understanding of a subject that has consumed much of his attention since the first of his 15 summers as a seasonal firefighter."
--John Schauble, History Australia

"Pyne's short book...charts the cyclical nature of official attitudes to fire in Australia and the transfers of the prevailing conventional wisdom about fire...This book is a brief and readable summation of the biology, the policy, the imposition of European values on a distinctly non-European landscape, the maturation of the technocratic attitude, the rise of the conservationist non-burners and the land use changes, which all have influenced strategic fire use in Australia...Read this book and benefit from the global perspective of this learned American author."
--Robert Dyason, Australian Forest Grower

Stephen Pyne is an emeritus professor at Arizona State University. Among his many books are Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire, and Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910.