Young Men and Fire

How do I describe Young Men and Fire, by Norman Maclean? First off, it tells the story of the Mann Gulch fire, a forest fire in Montana in 1949 that killed twelve Smokejumpers, firefighters who parachute into forest fires. Maclean has an obsession with the fire, and writes this book to piece together the details of the fire, but also to exorcise his obsession. The book is partly history in the form of a story; Maclean repeatedly refers to himself not as a writer but as a storyteller. It is partly a detective novel; he spends years looking through archives for research, talks to survivors, and makes three visits back to Mann Gulch to pinpoint exactly where each step of the tragedy occurred. I wouldn't have thought the process of research could be exciting, but Maclean makes it suspenseful. He throws in twists such as new evidence or an overlooked tree that describes which way the fire really went.
I suppose one of the main attractions of a book about wildfire is the extremes. Because the story takes place in the mountains of the West, fire is on a greater scale than on the East Coast. The firefighters job is merely to keep the fire from spreading, and they consider this an easy job if it's over by 10am the next morning, twenty hours after they get on the fire. Maclean describes one fire he worked on where he raced ahead of the fire and, when he finally reached the ridge, "had to put out the fire that smoldered in my shoelaces." This same fire, though not "two hundred feet of flame in the sky" continued to burn from August through the winter, when he saw "stumps and fallen trees still burning, with smoke coming out of the blackened holes in the snow." This is a different order of life from my personal one, and even different from most adventure books. The extreme stakes trim life to the essentials of survival.