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Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California’s Wildfires
Maybe someday
37
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
35/100Critics
40/100Scholars
Author:
Jaime Lowe
Publisher:
MCD
Date:
July 27, 2021
Of the thousands of firefighters who battle California's blazes every year, roughly 30 percent of the on-the-ground crews are inmates earning a dollar an hourâand about 200 of them are women. Jaime Lowe takes readers inside the women's fire-camp operations, narrating deeply personal histories and the emotional and physical intensity of firefighting.
What The Reviewers Say
... an immersive, comprehensive look at Jones’ life and the lives of other incarcerated firefighters, as well as California’s history of inmate firefighting and its growing reliance on it.
... remarkable.
The California penal system allows prisoners to train and form crews in the Conservation Camp program to fight the state’s all-too-frequent wildfires. 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.
