“Writing with Fire is a remarkable book, scrupulously scholarly and highly personal, objectively rational and deeply emotional. Welke has braided three strands of contemporary life, difficult, even impossible, to contemplate: the maiming and death of children in fire; the death of her own child and her response to that death; and the course of twentieth-century professional life, which has come to define the contemporary academy and dictate the disciplined subjectivities deemed appropriate to its purposes. Placed amongst those purposes, Welke’s book seems strange, even awkward. How can these strands of life, these emotions, these realities, belong among the discourses of dispassion and data we have been taught to practice? In fact, our estrangement is Welke’s greatest achievement. There are no neat resolutions here, no tidy explanations of lives damaged or destroyed while worlds spin on regardless. But as the fragile strands she presents for our inspection entwine, and if we are patient, perhaps a new and different sensibility will awaken, in which unspeakable pain can yet become knowledge for those who remain.”

“From events that barely made it into one-inch news stories, from academic developments scarcely acknowledged, and from her own grief at the death of her young daughter, Welke spins a profound, eloquent, and brave narrative that enables us to comprehend lives not our own—and also our own. Writing with Fire is an important history, which deploys the creative research skills of the legal historian and the journalistic skills of the oral historian to make a remarkable literary narrative that changed my mind about how history can be written.”

“A brilliant and exquisitely rendered work of history, Writing with Fire is also a revelatory exploration of love, loss, and the creation of meaning. Welke braids together three stories whose juxtaposition powerfully testifies to the inseparability of our intellectual and intimate lives. This study of life-altering tragedy and its contributions to human knowledge is a gentle, wrenching masterpiece that changed how I see the world.”

“Writing with Fire—a memoir, a history, and an experiment in writing—offers a new view on American social and legal and economic history. Beautifully written and creatively researched, the book addresses pains experienced by small children, parents, and to a lesser degree, academics. For legal historians, a dramatic change of vantage point and perspective. For all readers, an opportunity to reflect on the contingencies of life and on the course of their own lives.”

“What a profound, heart-rending, heart-healing work of history! But Writing with Fire transcends history. It is at once a landmark account of the way institutions shaped the lives of ordinary people in the twentieth-century US and an offering of searing, intimate stories of grief and those who have summoned the strength to go on living. Welke has wrought something entirely unique: a scholarly tour de force, a moving memoir, and a literary masterpiece.”

“Welke is a beautiful writer and a brilliant scholar. She is also a parent whose teenage daughter died suddenly. Writing with Fire ingeniously intertwines Welke’s letters to her daughter with two very different kinds of stories from the pages of history. Deeply honest, extraordinarily original, at times wrenching, these interleaved narratives combine fragility and courage with astounding grace. There is no other book like this one. I was spellbound.”