On the Shelf <\/p>\n
Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America\u2019s New Age of Disaster<\/p>\n
By Jacob Soboroff
Mariner Books: 272 pages, $30<\/p>\n
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from <\/i>Bookshop.org<\/a>, whose fees support independent bookstores.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n If journalism is the first draft of history, TV news is a rough, improbable sketch. As last year\u2019s wildfires multiplied, still 0% contained, field reporters \u2014 tasked with articulating the unintelligible on camera \u2014 grieved alongside Los Angeles in real time.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat are you supposed to say when the entire community you were born and raised in is wiped off the map, literally burning to the ground before your eyes?\u201d Jacob Soboroff writes in \u201cFirestorm,\u201d<\/a> out in early January ahead of the Palisades and Eaton fires\u2019 first anniversary. \u201cI couldn\u2019t come up with much.\u201d<\/p>\n Viewers saw that struggle Jan. 8, 2025. Soboroff, then an NBC News national correspondent, briefly broke the fourth wall while trying to describe the destruction of his former hometown, the Pacific Palisades.<\/p>\n \u201cFirestorm,\u201d <\/a>the first book about the Great Los Angeles Fires of 2025, pulls readers inside Soboroff\u2019s reporter\u2019s notebook and the nearly two relentless weeks he spent covering the Palisades and subsequent Eaton wildfire. \u201cFire, it turns out, can be a remarkable time machine,\u201d he writes, \u201ca curious form of teleportation into the past and future all at once.\u201d<\/p>\n The book argues the future long predicted arrived the morning of Jan. 7. The costliest wildfire event in American history, so far, was compounded by cascading failures and real-time disinformation, ushering in what Soboroff calls America\u2019s New Age of Disaster: \u201cEvery aspect of my childhood flashed before my eyes, and, while I\u2019m not sure I understood it as I stared into the camera\u2026I saw my children\u2019s future, too, or at least some version of it.\u201d<\/p>\n In late December, Soboroff returned to the Palisades Recreation Center<\/u><\/a> for the first time since it burned. Tennis balls popped from the courts down the bluff. Kids shrieked around the playground\u2019s ersatz police cars, ambulance and fire trucks \u2014 part of a $30-million public-private<\/a> rebuild backed by City Hall, billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso and Lakers coach JJ Redick, among others.<\/p>\n The sun peeks through the morning marine layer as Soboroff stops at a plaque on the sole standing structure, a New Deal-era basketball gym. His parents\u2019 names are etched at the top; below them, family, friends, neighbors. It\u2019s practically a family tree in metal, commemorating the one-man fundraising efforts<\/u><\/a> of his father, the business developer Steve Soboroff, to repair the local play area. It was also the elder Soboroff\u2019s entry point into civic life, the start of a career that later included 10 years as an LAPD police commissioner, a mayoral bid and a 90-day stint as L.A.\u2019s\u2019 fire recovery czar.<\/p>\n \u201cAll because my dad hit his head at this park,\u201d Soboroff says with a smirk, recalling the incident that set off his father\u2019s community safety efforts.<\/p>\n He checks the old office where he borrowed basketballs as a kid. \u201cWhat\u2019s happening? Are people still coming to the park?\u201d he asks a Recreation and Parks employee, slipping into man-on-the-street mode.<\/p>\n On a drive down memory lane (Sunset Boulevard), Soboroff jokes he could close his eyes and trace the street by feel alone. Past rows of yard signs \u2014 \u201cKAREN BASS RESIGN NOW\u201d \u2014 and tattered American flags, grass and rose bushes push through the wreckage. Pompeii by the Pacific.<\/p>\n Jacob Soboroff.<\/p>\n (Eric Thayer \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n At the corner where he once ran a lemonade stand, Soboroff FaceTimed his mother on national television<\/u><\/a> to show her what remained of the home he was born in. Before the fires, he had never quite turned the microphone on himself.<\/p>\n During the worst of it, with no one else around but the roar of the firestorm, \u201cI had to hold it up to myself,\u201d he says. \u201cThat was a different assignment than I\u2019ve ever had to do.\u201d<\/p>\n Soboroff is a boyish 42, with a mop of dark curls and round specs, equally comfortable in the field and at the anchor desk. J-school was never the plan. But he got a taste for scoops as an advance man to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. MTV News once seemed like the dream, but he always much preferred the loose, happy talk of public television\u2019s Huell Howser<\/a>. MSNBC took notice of his post-grad YouTube and HuffPost spots and hired him in 2015.<\/p>\n Ten years later, he was tiring of breaking news assignments and stashed away his \u201cTV News cosplay gear\u201d to ring in 2025. But when he saw the winds fanning the flames in the Palisades from NBC\u2019s bureau at Universal Studios, he fished out a yellow Nomex fire jacket and hopped in a three-ton white Jeep with his camera crew.<\/p>\n The opening chapters of \u201cFirestorm\u201d read like a sci-fi thriller. All-caps warnings ricochet between agencies. Smoke columns appear. High-wind advisories escalate. Soboroff slingshots the reader from the Palisades fire station to the National Weather Service office, a presidential hotel room, toppled power lines in Altadena, helitankers above leveled streets and Governor Newsom\u2019s emergency operations center.<\/p>\n Between live shots with producer Bianca Seward and cameramen Jean Bernard Rutagarama and Alan Rice, Soboroff fields frantic calls from both loved ones and the unexpected contacts, desperate for eyes on the ground. One is from Katie Miller, a former White House aide who cut contact after the reporter published \u201cSeparated,\u201d his 2020 book on the Trump family separation policy. Miller, wife of Trump advisor Stephen Miller, asks him to check on her in-laws\u2019 home. \u201cYou\u2019re the only one I can see who is there,\u201d she writes. Soboroff confirms the house is gone. \u201cPalisades is stronger than politics in my book,\u201d he replies. For a moment, old divisions vanish. It doesn\u2019t last. <\/p>\n Jacob Soboroff at McNally Avenue and East Mariposa Street in Altadena.<\/p>\n (Eric Thayer \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n He returns home to Frogtown, changes out of smoke-soaked clothes and grabs a few hours\u2019 sleep before heading back out. \u201cYet another body blow from the pounding relentlessness of the back-to-back-to-back-to-back fires,\u201d he writes. Fellow native Palisadian and MS Now colleague Katy Tur flies in to tour the \u201cneighborhood of our youth incinerated.\u201d<\/p>\n After the fires, Soboroff moved straight into covering the immigration enforcement raids across Los Angeles. He struggled to connect with others, though. Maybe a little depressed. The book didn\u2019t crystallize until April, after a conversation with Jonathan White, a captain in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, who is now running for congress.<\/p>\n Fire, White tells him, has become the fastest-growing threat in America and, for many communities, the most immediate. Soboroff began tracking down people he\u2019d met during the blaze \u2014 firefighters, scientists, residents, federal officials \u2014 and churned out pages on weekends. He kept the book tightly scoped, Jan. 7\u201324, ending with President Trump\u2019s visit to the Palisades with Gov. Newsom. He saved the investigative journalism and political finger-pointing for other writers.<\/p>\n \u201cFor me, it\u2019s a much more personal book,\u201d Soboroff says. \u201cIt\u2019s about experiencing what I came to understand as the fire of the future. It\u2019s about people as much as politics.\u201d<\/p>\n Looking back \u2014 and learning from the fire \u2014 became a form of release, he said, as much for him as for the city. \u201cWhat happened here is a lesson for everybody all across the country.\u201d<\/p>\n Rudi, an L.A. native, is a freelance art and culture writer. She\u2019s <\/i>at work on her debut novel about a stuttering student journalist.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \/\/www.instagram.com\/embed.js<\/a> On the Shelf Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America\u2019s New Age of Disaster By Jacob SoboroffMariner Books: 272 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. If journalism is the first draft of history, TV news is a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15905,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/A-year-after-the-Great-LA-Fires-Jacob-Soboroffs-\u2018Firestorm.com2F5e2Ff12Fe4ee60d246d68a6367db5185.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15904"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15906,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15904\/revisions\/15906"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"