Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy
Alistair Gee, Dani Anguiano, 2020
W.W. Norton
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781324005148
Summary
The harrowing story of the most destructive American wildfire in a century.
There is no precedent in postwar American history for the destruction of the town of Paradise, California. On November 8, 2018, the community of 27,000 people was swallowed by the ferocious Camp Fire, which razed virtually every home and killed at least 85 people.
The catastrophe seared the American imagination, taking the front page of every major national newspaper and top billing on the news networks. It displaced tens of thousands of people, yielding a refugee crisis that continues to unfold.
Fire in Paradise is a dramatic and moving narrative of the disaster based on hundreds of in-depth interviews with residents, firefighters and police, and scientific experts.
Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano are California-based journalists who have reported on Paradise since the day the fire began. Together they reveal the heroics of the first responders, the miraculous escapes of those who got out of Paradise, and the horrors experienced by those who were trapped.
Their accounts are intimate and unforgettable, including…
• the local who left her home on foot as fire approached while her 82-year-old father stayed to battle it;
• the firefighter who drove into the heart of the inferno in his bulldozer;
• the police officer who switched on his body camera to record what he thought would be his final moments as the flames closed in;
• the mother who, less than 12 hours after giving birth in the local hospital, thought she would die in the chaotic evacuation with her baby in her lap.
Gee and Anguiano also explain the science of wildfires, write powerfully about the role of the power company PG&E in the blaze, and describe the poignant efforts to raise Paradise from the ruins.
This is the story of a town at the forefront of a devastating global shift—of a remarkable landscape sucked ever drier of moisture and becoming inhospitable even to trees, now dying in their tens of millions and turning to kindling.
It is also the story of a lost community, one that epitomized a provincial, affordable kind of Californian existence that is increasingly unattainable.
It is, finally, a story of a new kind of fire behavior that firefighters have never witnessed before and barely know how to handle. What happened in Paradise was unprecedented in America. Yet according to climate scientists and fire experts, it will surely happen again. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Alastair Gee is an award-winning editor and reporter at the Guardian who has also written for the New Yorker online, the New York Times, and the Economist. Gee lives in New York City.
Dani Anguiano writes for the Guardian and was formerly a reporter for the Chico Enterprise-Record, where she covered Butte County, including Chico and Paradise. Having lived in Butte County for a decade, Anguiano now resides in the San Francisco Bay area.
(Bios from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
The heart of the book… is the individual stories of bravery and tragedy that played out in Paradise…. The horror of the fire’s relentless advance is viscerally evoked, although the details sometimes verge on unbearable…. The authors temper the horror with stories of heroism and rescue…. [Fire in Paradise] has the narrative propulsion and granular detail of the best breaking-news disaster journalism…. The main takeaway from their book is sobering:… we will likely see more fires as destructive as the one in Paradise.
Rachel Monroe - New York Times Book Book Review
[T]ense and detailed…. Gee and Anguiano vividly describe the conflagration without sensationalizing it…. This impressive report makes a convincing case that such tragedies as the Camp Fire are not a freak occurrence, but a glimpse of the future.
Publishers Weekly
[A] gripping, in-depth account of the Camp Fire that devastated Paradise, CA…. A vividly descriptive, compelling, well-researched, page-turning work of narrative nonfiction, both heartbreaking and uplifting. —Sue O'Brien, Downers Grove, IL
Library Journal
Drawing heavily on the powerful interviews they conducted at the time and in the stunned aftermath, [Gee and Anguiano] have created a gripping account of the fire and how it affected the community.
Booklist
[A] powerful book debut… [drawing on] extensive reporting to produce a tense, often moving narrative about the fire that destroyed the northern California town of Paradise.… A riveting narrative that provides further compelling evidence for the urgency of environmental stewardship.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for FIRE IN PARADISE … then take off on your own:
1. Talk about the causes of the wild fire, both the immediate and underlying causes.
2. (Follow-up to Question 1) What role did Pacific Gas and Electric play? Is the near-villainy that the authors tend to ascribe to the utility deserved or unfairly placed?
3. Discuss the many individual accounts included in Gee and Anguiano's account. Which stories do you find most horrific or most tragic—and which of them illustrate great courage, even heroism. Consider not only residents, old and young, but first responders, doctors, and nurses, and even the drivers stuck in traffic.
4. Talk about the town's preparedness to avert such a disaster, its evacuation plan and emergency alert system. What happened to a town that seemed to be so well prepared?
5. What do the authors suggest will be the long-term future for northern California and towns like Paradise?
6. Should Paradise be rebuilt?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)