The Great Los Angeles Fires of 2025: A Guest Post by Jacob Soboroff
NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff shares his first-hand account of the 2025 LA fires that engulfed his hometown, analyzes what led to the devastating wildfires and shares the measures that need to be taken to prevent a similar disaster.
Hardcover
$27.00
$30.00
Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster
Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$27.00
$30.00
A “gripping, unshakeable firsthand account” (San Francisco Chronicle) of the firestorm that consumed Los Angeles, from the MS NOW reporter and New York Times bestselling author of Separated, who covered the fires on the ground as an LA native.
A “gripping, unshakeable firsthand account” (San Francisco Chronicle) of the firestorm that consumed Los Angeles, from the MS NOW reporter and New York Times bestselling author of Separated, who covered the fires on the ground as an LA native.
Last January, I took this selfie after watching the place I grew up, Pacific Palisades, incinerate. Before 2026, I had never shared it publicly, but I decided to because it reminds me of why I wrote my just-released book, Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster. It’s available in stores, as an e-book and digital audiobook now.
I’ll never forget what it felt like to learn something no journalism school nor a decade working in all corners of the world will teach you: how to report live on national television while you watch your hometown burn down— essentially wiped off the map.
In Firestorm, you’ll read about how I spent every day for nearly two weeks covering the Great Los Angeles Fires of 2025. The literal firestorm that all Angelenos, including tens of thousands of evacuees, extraordinarily brave first responders, my fellow members of the fourth estate, and I experienced in real time — while you likely followed along with us on television or online — is now one of the most destructive wildfire events in US history.
Being there as friends, former neighbors, and so many familiar faces were forced to flee, then to stand there as so many of my childhood memories carbonized while the nation watched was impossible to comprehend in real time. The experience left me with questions that lingered long beyond the fire dominating the headlines. What had I just witnessed? How could it have happened? Is it inevitable something like it will happen again? Those and other questions are why I set out to write Firestorm, the toughest assignment I’ve ever undertaken.
What I’ve learned is that what so many of us experienced together was the fire of the future. The book might read like a sci-fi thriller, but it’s a minute-by-minute account of the lived reality of so many Angelenos, and what it will be like for so many more of us, soon, as the global climate emergency collides with our collapsing infrastructure, changes in the way we live, and the political climate in which this is all taking place.
Firestorm won’t prevent future disasters. I’m not a civil engineer, or a climate scientist, or an urban planner, or someone with the ability to reverse the polarization in our politics. But I am a journalist guided by a simple principle: Report the facts on the ground as I always have done. To tell to you, as I always endeavor to do, what I saw, who I met, and what I learned during and after the Great Los Angeles Fires about America’s New Age of Disaster.
I hope you’ll read Firestorm today.