Authors On Authors

The Rainy Day Room is happy to introduce "Authors on Authors", a new review page to afford the Independent Authors of good books additional exposure. We'll try to put up interesting overviews of their work that goes a little beyond the normal reiteration of content or plot. I don't see authors as in competition with each other. The readers can read the books faster than we can write them if they only know they are 'out there', so be sure to share the link to this page with the readers on your 'lists'. We welcome submissions from anyone with a favorite book they'd like to introduce to others because of the impact it had on them as a reader or an author. There will be no 'ranking' number assigned, as the intention is to share, not to judge.

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One Foot in the Black

by Kurt L. Kamm

Synopsis:

Greg Kowalski grows up in Michigan with an emotionally and physically abusive father, a Saginaw city firefighter. Cut off from his family, Greg travels to California to become a seasonal firefighter with CDF. He is tormented by the contradiction of hatred for his father and the need to have his father's approval and love. Greg moves on to the brutal LACoFD Helitak-Attack training academy where he graduates and begins work. He suffers traumatic stress after his crew is trapped on a mountainside in an explosive wildfire in which his captain and mentor dies. The night before this incident, Greg's father is killed in a fire in Saginaw. Greg struggles to cope. He comes to terms with the loss of his captain but has greater difficulty surmounting his father's influence on his life. This story focuses on the two formative years of his training as a young wild land firefighter when Greg comes of age and finds acceptance and comfort within the 'family' of his fire crew.

About the Author

Kurt Kamm has lived through several fires in Malibu, CA. The October 2007 Canyon Fire, a seventy mile per hour Santa Anna wind driven inferno, burned to his front door.

Review

“Wildfires have personalities. Some of them creep around in the brush and try to lull you into a sense of overconfidence. They hide until they gain strength and then overwhelm you when you least expect it . . .” I learned this from the author on page two. On page 241, I realized I could almost write the same verbal illustration for the personalities of the book itself.

One Foot In The Black, the book, begins in an anchor point, that place from which firefighters start building a fire line, or in this case, the story. A gripping presentation of subject and plot and the two main characters comes in the ‘anchor point’ prologue with “. . . a year ago, I saw a man go up in flames.”

Then, the personalities, the “spot fires, those flashes outside the perimeter that will ignite the main fire”, start creeping in. They flare up in a back and forth accounting of past and present; chopping through the brush and strengthening and developing the two main characters: Greg Kowalski, an emotionally beaten down, but driven, young firefighter trainee on a mission to prove himself to his abusive firefighter father. And a massive wildfire named Pozo. Both young Greg and Pozo grow into another fire personality . . . “they come right at you, no tricks, nothing fancy, just all-out assault.”

My deep admiration for the courage of the firefighters who risk their own lives to save other lives, to save the forests and the flatlands, the structures, that are the fodder of the flames was already built-in. I have a recently retired Battalion Chief in my own family. I witnessed the majestic Tetons and Yellowstone on fire in 2001. But in One Foot In The Black, author Kurt L. Kamm took me right into the belly of the beast and revealed the very guts and personalities of the ‘Fire’ and the men that go up against them in battle. I guarantee you; I’ll never view a wild land fire or a firefighter in quite the same way ever again. One Foot In The Black is as compelling and timely a book as any you could read. With the changing climate, I’d venture to say, as you need to read.

Susan Haley

Author of Rainy Day People