Fire in Paradise

Written by:
Alastair Gee , Dani Anguiano
Narrated by:
T. Ryder Smith

Unabridged Audiobook

Ratings
Book
18
Narrator
9
Release Date
May 2020
Duration
7 hours 38 minutes
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 officers, 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; and 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 PGE 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
Reviews
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Anonymous

I was there…. It was madness…. The book is all too real.

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Anonymous

Wow…interesting. May listen again. Always hear different things second time through.

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Robert B.

An all too real account of Paradise on fire. This book kept me up all night with personalized tales of people making life or death choices.

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Anonymous

Very good book. I appreciated the narration and the depth of voice to the persons involved. God be with them, they have been through a true ordeal.

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