Meet Philip Connors, author of Fire Season, the new book the New York Times is calling the “Walden of Wildfire.”

Philip Connors will be present for conversation and book-signing at a special luncheon benefiting the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance on Wednesday, April 27 at the Artichoke Cafe in Albuquerque. Click here for more info and to get tickets online.

More from the New York Times review on April 8 (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/books/review/book-review-fire-season-by-philip-connors.html):

“…There are few territories left as wild and grand and as richly meaningful, or as spectacularly combustible, as the one Connors found almost a decade ago — New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness, the first designated wilderness in the history of the world, which also happens to be, as Connors puts it in his finely, wryly, at times poetically wrought first book, “the epicenter of American wildfire.”

In the spring of 2002, then a copy editor at The Wall Street Journal, Connors quit the canyons of Manhattan for the mountains of the Gila. Upon arriving, he ascended 10,000 feet above sea level to the summit of Apache Peak, then another several flights of stairs to the top of a Depression-era lookout tower. There, for the next five months, in a 7-by-7-foot “steel and glass room immaculately designed to attract lightning,” he spent his days as “a professional watcher of mountains,” “a sensei of the sedentary,” “an aristocrat of sky,” which is to say as a lookout in the employ of the United States Fire Service — the U.S. Fire Circus, he now prefers to call it. He has resumed the post every summer since.”