Fire is a collection of short pieces from the 90s by master of narrative non-fiction Sebastian Junger. The work starts out with firefighting crews in the American west, and then moves through the conflicts of the 90s: Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Cyprus, Afghanistan. It's a weird collection, written in Fukuyama's End of History and published when history returned with a vengeance after 9/11. Two decades on, could we have a little less history, please?

Even pedestrian Junger is an entertaining and thoughtful read. My two favorite pieces were on the frozen conflict in Cyprus, which asks the question "If this went on forever, would anyone mind?", and a short piece on those who court danger called "Colter's Way", which gets at the heart of Junger's whole project: finding moments of adventure, of desperate life-or-death survival, beyond the stifling comforts of modernity.