An American Tragedy

 Title:  Fire in Paradise:  An American Tragedy

Author:  Alastair Gee, Dani Anguiano

Genre: Nonfiction

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.

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.

Rating: Very good.
Why I Like It:  I did not know anything about the wildfires in the west and I learned a lot about how they happen.  But, it is a sad story about destruction and death caused by this fire.

Other: I listened to it on audio.

 
Reviewer: Nancy Bucher