Overview

From the MSNBC Senior Political and National Correspondent and New York Times bestselling author of Separated, a gripping and revelatory account of the devastating 2025 Los Angeles fires, which he covered on the ground as an LA native.  On the morning of January 7, 2025, a message pinged the phone of Jacob Soboroff, a national correspondent for NBC News. “Big Palisades fire. We are evacuating,” his brother texted within minutes of the blaze engulfing the hillside behind the home where he and his pregnant wife were living. “Really bad.” An attached photo showed a huge black plume rising from behind the house, an umbrella of smoke towering over everything they owned. Jacob rushed to the office of the bureau chief. “I should go. I grew up in the Palisades.” Soon he was on the front line of the blaze—his first live report of what would turn out to be weeks covering unimaginable destruction, from both the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire, in Altadena. In the days to come, Soboroff appeared across the networks of NBC News as Los Angeles was ablaze, met with displaced residents and workers, and pressed Governor Gavin Newsom in an interview on Meet the Press. But no story Soboroff has covered at home or abroad—the trauma of family separation at the border, the displacement of the war in Ukraine, the collapse of order in Haiti—could have prepared him for reporting live as the hallmarks of his childhood were engulfed in flames around him while his hometown burned to the ground. But for Soboroff, questions remained after the fires were controlled: what had he just witnessed How could it have happened Is it inevitable something like it will happen again This set Soboroff off on months of reporting—with firefighters, fire victims, political leaders, academics, earth scientists, wildlife biologists, meteorologists and more—that made him keenly aware of how the misfortune of seeing his past carbonize was also a form of time travel into the dystopian world his children will inhabit. This is because the 2025 LA fires were not an isolated tragedy, but rather they are a harbinger—""the fire of the future,"" in the words of one senior emergency—management official. Firestorm is the story of the costliest wildfire in American history, the people it affected and the deeply personal connection to one journalist covering it. It is a love letter to Los Angeles, a yearning to understand the fires, and why America’s new age of disaster we are living through portends that—without a reckoning of how Los Angeles burned—there is more yet, and worse, to come.

Full Product Details

9780063467965

Table of Contents

Reviews

""An emotional and intrepid account of the Los Angeles wildfires. . . . A cathartically heartbreaking account of the unique horror of watching one's community reduced to ash."" - Publishers Weekly

""The seminal book on the child-separation policy."" - Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show ""Groundbreaking. ... All the original reporting in this book is extraordinary."" - Andrea Mitchell ""Separated, by the MSNBC and NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff, shows how the Trump administration implemented a policy that amounted to a humanitarian catastrophe: systematically taking children from their migrant parents at the border. ... Will give you a sense of how the United States, a country that prides itself on its constitutional protections, also possesses a body of immigration laws that can be weaponized by an executive branch willing to do it. ... [A] horrifying story. ... Highlight[s] the secrecy and 'extraordinary confusion' of the process. ... What Soboroff memorably depicts isn't just tragic but brutal. Any soaring rhetoric about yearning to breathe free has been traded in for the crudest of threats: If you try to come here, just look at what we're willing to do."" - Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

Author Information

Jacob Soboroff is a correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC. He was a recipient of the 2019 Walter Cronkite Award for Individual Achievement by a National Journalist. He lives in Los Angeles.

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