'The Last Fire Season' describes what it was like to live through Calif.'s wildfires
Recounting months spent dodging wildfires, writer Manjula Martin considers what it means to create a home in a place that is destined to burn, and to live "inside a damaged body on a damaged planet."
Manjula Martin woke before dawn one morning in mid-Aug. 2020 in her home in West Sonoma County, Calif., to a dry lightning storm.
"Above the redwoods fathomless clouds lingered like silence," she writes. "From inside them the furious sky hurled its energy at millions of acres of dry, deep wood." The forest surrounding her was all-too ready to burn.
Martin (no relation to this reviewer) had lived through many prior Northern California fire seasons — she grew up in Santa Cruz, had lived in the San Francisco Bay area on and off throughout her adulthood, and had settled
