{"product_id":"9780374116187","title":"Breathing Fire : Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California's Wildfires","description":"\u003cstrong\u003eBreathing Fire\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor(s): Jaime Lowe\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eShawna was overcome by the claustrophobia, the heat, the smoke, the fire, all just down the canyon and up the ravine. She was feeling the adrenaline, but also the terror of doing something for the first time. She knew how to run with a backpack; they had trained her physically. But that’s not training for flames. That’s not live fire.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCalifornia’s fire season gets hotter, longer, and more extreme every year — fire season is now year-round. Of the thousands of firefighters who battle California’s blazes every year, roughly 30 percent of the on-the-ground wildland crews are inmates earning a dollar an hour. Approximately 200 of those firefighters are women serving on all-female crews. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eBreathing Fire\u003c\/i\u003e, Jaime Lowe expands on her revelatory work for \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e. She has spent years getting to know dozens of women who have participated in the fire camp program and spoken to captains, family and friends, correctional officers, and camp commanders. The result is a rare, illuminating look at how the fire camps actually operate — a story that encompasses California’s underlying catastrophes of climate change, economic disparity, and historical injustice, but also draws on deeply personal histories, relationships, desires, frustrations, and the emotional and physical intensity of firefighting.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLowe’s reporting is a groundbreaking investigation of the prison system, and an intimate portrayal of the women of California’s Correctional Camps who put their lives on the line, while imprisoned, to save a state in peril.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReview(s):\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Riveting from the first page, Jaime Lowe’s \u003ci\u003eBreathing Fire\u003c\/i\u003e is an unsentimental and vividly human portrait of a group of women in an inmate firefighting program that every Californian relies on—a program that the state presents as transformative and redemptive even as these women risk their lives for dollars a day and emerge into abandonment. Lowe’s writing is kinetic, her focus is resolutely intimate even as her frame remains far-reaching, and her reporting is essential. This book is a lasting entry in the pantheon of California nonfiction, that literature of desperation and promise and emergency.\" \u003cbr\u003e—JIA TOLENTINO, author of \u003ci\u003eTrick Mirror\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In recent years, women inmates have joined the army of prison labor that  California relies upon to fight its wildfires, whether defending the  Sequoias or celebrity homes on the Malibu Coast. It is dangerous, relentless work that ultimately depends upon the arduous personal transformations that create unity and fighting spirit within each fire crew. Against the background of recent megafires, Lowe  chronicles the transcendent moments of triumph and tragedy that stir  ambitions of a new life, but then recounts the systemic cruelty that  undermines every  hope of translating their new skills and hard-won self-confidence into civilian careers. Lionesses betrayed.”\u003cbr\u003e—MIKE DAVIS, author of \u003ci\u003eCity of Quartz \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eEcology of Fear\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eBreathing Fire\u003c\/i\u003e is a powerful examination of the lives of the Malibu 13, whose labor, like that of the hundreds of incarcerated women who live (and sometimes die) fighting wildland fires, keeps the residents of the State of California safe each year. But this book is so much more. It is the story of friendship, and of prisons, jails, and foster homes, and of love and family life and labor in the wake of mass incarceration. Lowe’s vivid and sensitive account walks us through a history of confinement in California through the arrest, imprisonment, release and collective mourning of a generation of women caught in the gears of the American criminal justice system.\" \u003cbr\u003e—REUBEN JONATHAN MILLER, author of \u003ci\u003eHalfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"With dogged reporting, and an unforgettable cast of strong women as its memorable characters, \u003ci\u003eBreathing Fire t\u003c\/i\u003eells a powerful story. The heroes here are women inmates fighting for their lives on burning hillsides, and inside prison yards and bad relationships. They seek redemption with chainsaws, shovels and axes in hand. Jaime Lowe tells their story with respect and compassion, and with a sharp eye for injustice.\"\u003cbr\u003e—HÉCTOR TOBAR, author of \u003ci\u003eDeep Down Dark\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Jaime Lowe's deeply reported, intimate account of the women on the front lines of climate change and its horrific tolls knocked the wind  out of me. \u003ci\u003eBreathing Fire\u003c\/i\u003e is about risk and loss and injustice and  terror, told through keenly inscribed individual stories; it is riveting  and heartbreaking.\"\u003cbr\u003e—REBECCA TRAISTER, author of \u003ci\u003eGood and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eAll the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"We  see and hear and breathe with the women Jaime Lowe profiles as they fight forest fires while also doing time. Her deep reporting and  immersive storytelling animates every page of this intimate and powerful  book, which is also a snapshot of unnerving environmental change.\" \u003cbr\u003e—EMILY BAZELON, author of \u003ci\u003eCharged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A book as humane, generous and brave as its heroines, \u003ci\u003eBreathing Fire\u003c\/i\u003e is the journalism we need now, an urgent story from our carceral front lines given to us by a writer brilliantly alert to vulnerability and strength. A very good book about fire; a profound book about courage and care.\"\u003cbr\u003e—JEFF SHARLETT, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eThe Family\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"There is no bleaker glimpse of the superheated future we're all hurtling toward than the fact that female inmates, many of them women of  color, are earning roughly $1 an hour protecting the rest of wealthy California  from its growing wildfires. Jaime Lowe's powerful, immersive book makes it impossible to ignore the reality of their lives—and the reality that  we can do better.\"\u003cbr\u003e—MCKENZIE FUNK, author of \u003ci\u003eWindfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A detailed and infuriating depiction of America’s inhumane practice of  deploying inmate firefighters . . . Lowe writes compellingly . . .  [\u003ci\u003eBreathing\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eFire\u003c\/i\u003e] is a story of 21st-century chain gangs in the  star-studded hills of Malibu battling the consequences of climate change and of a country lost in the mire of seemingly endless mass  incarceration.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—KIRKUS REVIEWS\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eISBN:  9780374116187\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e ","brand":"MCD","offers":[{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":40790146449614,"sku":"9780374116187","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0600\/7029\/7806\/products\/getimage_42fd2c8a-f39e-4460-bf97-223c26c8e173.jpg?v=1643199578","url":"https:\/\/pickwickbookshop.com\/products\/9780374116187","provider":"Pickwick Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}