In Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man, Jessica Bruder, a reporter for The Oregonian in Portland, presents lavish pictorial evidence of this organized explosion of the mass id. After a week of revelry, nudity, dehydration, sunburn and art-making, the burners incinerate the towering man (while dodging falling chunks of flaming debris) and then depart, taking all traces of their "ephemeropolis" with them.Ĭommentators have called the spectacle the "Bonfire of the Inanities." These so-called "burners" roll in by the thousands on the last Monday in August to the parched wasteland known as the playa (in the Black Rock Desert, not far from Reno) to set up a tent city amid clouds of dust, around a multistory human effigy. While some tempt fate by lighting up closer to home, others travel hundreds, even thousands, of miles to participate in Burning Man, the annual pyromaniac ritual in the Nevada desert. LITTLE ROCK - Burning Book, Jessica Bruder, Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 352 pages, $28.95 These Things Ain't Gonna Smoke Themselves, Emily Flake, Bloombsury, 122 pages, $12.95.
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