I don't know whether I would have cottoned to Theodore Roosevelt on a personal level. His bombastic, suck-the-wind-out-of-the-room personality might have grated on me, as it surely did Democrats during his time. And I would have found as weird his penchant for impromptu wrestling, skinny-dipping in Rock Creek and fisticuffs with acquaintances as bonding rituals. But as far as I'm concerned, Gutzon Borglum got it just right when he included Theodore Roosevelt in the Mount Rushmore pantheon.

Has anyone ever actually checked the other side of that granite monument in South Dakota? Could it be that behind TR there is a smaller effigy of Gifford Pinchot, the guy about whom Teddy wrote in his autobiography: "Among the many, many public officials who under my administration rendered invaluable service to the people of the United States, he on the whole stood first."

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America (2009) was written by Timothy Egan, author of The Worst Hard Time, which received and deserved the National Book Award. The former is spellbinding. It masterfully bundles the history of conservation and that of the U.S. Forest Service with the catastrophe that was the largest wildfire in American history. The book glorifies Roosevelt and Pinchot and it vilifies certain Gilded Age plutocrats/scoundrels who sought to privatize the West and undermine the emerging conservation movement. The loggerhead played out with one helluva wildfire, even though I would have enjoyed reading that Teddy pugilistically bonded the daylights out of his some of his detractors. Two of those were the U.S. Senators from Montana?anti-Progressives and ardent, active political foes of TR and Pinchot?William A. Clark, of Butte, who aspired to be the world's richest man, and Weldon Heyburn, of Wallace, who despised and railed against the notion of a Forest Service because, with respect to timber and mineral rights, he dismissed outright Roosevelt's assertion that "the rights of the public to the natural resources outweigh private rights."

The "Big Burn," or "Big Blowout" as it also is known to history, was a calamitous firestorm that reduced to ash about 3.2 million acres in Montana and Idaho in late August 1910. It claimed 78 lives, mostly those of firefighters ill-equipped to defend themselves from the inferno that started as a hundred small wildfires in the Bitterroot Mountains and merged into a single, raging, fire-breathing juggernaut. In a matter of merely two days, fueled by a truly arid summer and emboldened by a raging, conscripted, hurricane-force wind called a Palouser, the inferno torched and, in many places, incinerated everything?animal, vegetable and even mineral?in its broad path up and down forested mountainsides at peak speeds estimated variously at 60 to 80 miles per hour. Flinging firebrands 10 miles in its van, the flaming maelstrom's heat and convection winds seared lungs, imploded or laid down millions and mile upon mile of five-ton pines and centuries-old fir trees like a macabre game of pick-up-sticks.

Clapboard, firetrap, mining towns were nearly or entirely torched. Included were Taft, "the wickedest place in America" according to a Chicago paper, and Wallace, DeBorgia, Grand Forks and Haugen. Because there were not enough firefighters or close coordination by forest rangers ("Little G.P.s"), flames that engulfed a third of Wallace burned to cinders the home and property of lawyer, friend of mining syndicates and elected official Weldon Heyburn. Grim irony.

"The forests staggered, rocked, exploded and then shriveled under the holocaust," elsewhere wrote local historian Betty Goodwin Spencer. "Great red balls of fire rolled up the mountainsides. Crown fires, from 1 to 10 miles wide, streaked with yellow and purple and scarlet, raced through treetops 150 feet from the ground." Egan's descriptions are just as vivid; they tell of tumult and terror. They detail human frailty, caprice, tragedy, luck and heroism. Readers will learn of the valiant, stolid buffalo soldiers who replaced pandemonium and cowardice. They will hear of a spunky and capable mountain woman who walked away from fire whirls, past tumbling trees and through flames to safety and old age. They will discover that the need for the Forest Service was confirmed by the blaze and the agency's fire-prevention policies of subsequent decades were ambitious and faulty. They will meet Ed Pulaski, who lived in Wallace and resides now permanently in Forest Service lore.

The Big Burn genre is reminiscent of the works of Eric Larson (The Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck and Isaac's Storm), which weave factual, seemingly obscure and divergent events and circumstances into dramatic plot and consequence. Brilliant, entertaining, informative stuff. I have given away the "plot" of The Big Burn, but not its historical threads. Timothy Egan could write about a day in the life of a litter box and it would be good reading.

I don't care for the subtitle, "Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America;" it's misleading. Nor do I believe for a second that Egan wrote or intended that cheeky sales gimmick. The fire and Pinchot are the main characters. TR is a supporting player in this far-reaching episode, albeit an important one.

The Big Burn, published in 2009 by Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, sells for $27.00 in any airport and for less anyplace else in the free world. This book is highly recommended.