In The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt & The Fire That Saved America, the Pulitzer-winning longtime Seattle correspondent for The New York Times frames this short, well-told history through a 1910 blaze along the northern Idaho-Montana border, when Theodore Roosevelt was out of office and the Forest Service under siege from corrupt pols and industrialists. More than a forest fire, the largest of its kind in U.S. history, this was a battle between the conservationist movement—championed by Gifford Pinchot and Roosevelt—and reactionaries in Congress who were trying to defund the agency and its regulators. (Sound familiar?) Egan is joined tonight by other Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association prize winners: Jack Nisbet (The Collector), Cherie Priest (Boneshaker), and Cynthia Rylant and Nikki McClure (All in a Day). BRIAN MILLER

Tue., Feb. 16, 7 p.m., 2010