Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy is a gripping reconstruction of the 2018 wildfire that devastated the California town of Paradise, leaving at least 85 dead. Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano, journalists at the Guardian, bring their experience reporting on the fire and its aftermath to bear, relying heavily on interviews and eyewitness accounts to convey frightening scope and intensity of what came to be known as the Camp Fire. Fire in Paradise contains accounts of dozens of near-death experiences, including a desperate hospital evacuation and a family that had to wait out the fire in a freezing lake. The scale of the disaster is enormous, but the authors' focus on individual survival lends the book harrowing intimacy.
Gee and Anguiano also provide an overview of the circumstances that led to the Camp Fire, explaining the pattern of increasingly frequent and enormous wildfires due to climate change, the "shrubification" of California and, ironically, aggressive fire suppression efforts. Paradise's fire preparations and evacuation plans proved inadequate in the face of this new breed of fire, and the authors warn that circumstances are likely to get worse. After the fire turned much of Paradise to ash, the book follows its largely homeless former citizens as they make difficult decisions about their futures, including whether or not to rebuild Paradise.
Like many books recounting disasters, Fire in Paradise contains as much heroism as it does dangerous negligence. This one, though,is not just about Paradise and the Camp Fire, but the fires to come. --Hank Stephenson, manuscript reader, the Sun magazine