Firestorm
My new book.
One year ago this week, I took this selfie after watching the place I grew up, Pacific Palisades, incinerate. I’ve never shared before this now, but I decided to because it reminds me of why I wrote my just-released book, Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster. It’s available in stores, as an e-book and digital audiobook now.
I’ll never forget what it felt like to learn something no journalism school nor a decade working in all corners of the world will teach you: how to report live on national television while you watch your hometown burn down— essentially wiped off the map.
In Firestorm, you’ll read about how I spent every day for nearly two weeks covering the Great Los Angeles Fires of 2025. The literal firestorm that all Angelenos, including tens of thousands of evacuees, extraordinarily brave first responders, my fellow members of the fourth estate, and I experienced in real time — while you likely followed along with us on television or online — is now one of the most destructive wildfire events in US history.
Being there as friends, former neighbors, and so many familiar faces were forced to flee, then to stand there as so many of my childhood memories carbonized while the nation watched was impossible to comprehend in real time. The experience left me with questions that lingered long beyond the fire dominating the headlines. What had I just witnessed? How could it have happened? Is it inevitable something like it will happen again? Those and other questions are why I set out to write Firestorm, the toughest assignment I’ve ever undertaken.
What I’ve learned is that what so many of us experienced together was the fire of the future. The book might read like a sci-fi thriller, but it’s a minute-by-minute account of the lived reality of so many Angelenos, and what it will be like for so many more of us, soon, as the global climate emergency collides with our collapsing infrastructure, changes in the way we live, and the political climate in which this is all taking place.
Firestorm won’t prevent future disasters. I’m not a civil engineer, or a climate scientist, or an urban planner, or someone with the ability to reverse the polarization in our politics. But I am a journalist guided by a simple principle: Report the facts on the ground as I always have done. To tell to you, as I always endeavor to do, what I saw, who I met, and what I learned during and after the Great Los Angeles Fires about America’s New Age of Disaster.
I was also born in LA, in 1952. I’ve loved your work on MSNBC and now I’m in the middle of a firestorm because I’m listening to your fantastic read of your book, Firestorm, and you are putting me right there. I have to come up for air every couple of chapters. Harrowing! I hope you get every accolade and prize available for this heroic work of journalism. Long live the West Side and the Palisades!
It's horribly sad to watch your community burn and people die. I made the decision to relocate out of state even though I am a 4th generation Californian. The problems related to climate change are only going to get worse. Looking at my anticipated life span I believed my remaining living should be out of the urban interface. Less anxiety? Yes. Sense if loss? Yes. Do I feel safer? Yes. Tough decisions but at least I feel better able to move on and enjoy the time I have left.