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Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California's Wildfires
by
30/99
Critics
36/99
Readers
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Scholars
27/99
Rating
34/99
Volume
38/99
Rating
34/99
Volume
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About This Book
California'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. In Breathing Fire, Jaime Lowe expands on her revelatory work for The New York Times Magazine. 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 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.
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Reviews
"A detailed and infuriating depiction of America's inhumane practice of deploying inmate firefighters."
"Her important book also points to the uncomfortable truth that the front lines of the fight against climate change are peopled with those society has forgotten."
"Author Lowe spent more than five years in research and intimate interviews with a group of women who chose this path ..."
"Journalist Lowe (Mental) tackles climate change, mass incarceration, and the 'war on drugs' in this deeply reported if uneven account of California's inmate firefighting crews ..."
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