David Wyatt is a professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is the author of The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California and Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation.
"A marvelous short history of our most populous state...[Wyatt]
elegantly employs fire as a metaphor for the five milestone events
and phenomena in his survey of California...The later part of
Wyatt's account, with all its popular figures, evokes the freshness
of an E.L. Doctorow novel. Which means he has created a history you
will want to read."--Newsday
"David Wyatt elegantly entwines the public and personal in this
elegiac salute to California, our strangest, saddest, most
enchanting state."--Carolyn See, author of Dreaming: Hard Luck and
Good Times in America
"It's a fascinating beginning for the reader taken by this idea of
history swept along by flames."--Christian Science Monitor
"Wyatt has looked beyond the plastic Hollywood stereotypes to
uncover a rich and wildly diverse history. Five Fires is an urgent
retelling of the mythology of the Golden State."--Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.
"A big-picture view of California's history, told with verve and
considerable learning...Wyatt has much to relate, and he does so
exceptionally well, yielding a happy (and rare) instance when the
reader emerges wishing that a longish book would go on just a bit
longer."--Kirkus Reviews
"Five Fires is a patient, subtle, thoughtful pursuit of the human
experiences that can easily be obscured by the smoke and heat of
the prophetic mode....It is a story that should be attended to with
all the intelligent sensitivity we can muster....In the many life
stories it records, his book shows us how much we have to gain by
going across the borders we created. And in its own openness and
generosity of spirit, Five Fires is a glowing
example of how to get there."--tephen Railton, Professor English,
University of Virginia, The Virginia Quarterly Review
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