Synopses & Reviews
A dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires.
Shawna 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.
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 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.
Lowe’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.
Review
"Riveting from the first page, Jaime Lowe's Breathing Fire 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." Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror
Review
"With dogged reporting, and an unforgettable cast of strong women as its memorable characters, Breathing Fire tells 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." Héctor Tobar, author of Deep Down Dark
Review
"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. Breathing Fire is about risk and loss and injustice and terror, told through keenly inscribed individual stories; it is riveting and heartbreaking." Rebecca Traister, author of Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger and All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
Review
"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." McKenzie Funk, author of Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming
Video
Watch the Powell’s virtual event with Jaime Lowe and Jeff Sharlet!
About the Author
Jaime Lowe is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine and other national publications, and has appeared regularly on This American Life, RadioLab, and NPR. She is the author of Mental and Digging for Dirt and has taught writing at Wallkill Correctional Facility. Born and raised in California, she lives in New York City.