Author Pyne has a long relationship with forest fires; the Arizona State University professor was a wildland firefighter on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon for fifteen years, as well as a member of the United Nations Wildfire Advisory Group.

The phrase "awful splendour" was taken from a quote from early Canadian naturalist Henry Youle Hind, referring to the destructive beauty of prairie fires.

[1] The book is divided into three sections, titled "Torch", "Axe", and "Engine", roughly corresponding to the pre-contact, exploration, and industrial periods of Canadian history.

Reviewer David Brownstein called the book a "marvellously encyclopedic synthesis of a vast secondary literature on a complex topic.

The reviewer critiqued some of Pyne's organisational choices; by looking at fire management province-by-province, the third section of the book has some redundancies and can be "a chore to read (at least in places)."