Wildfires have increased everywhere - even in such unfamiliar locales as the New York City metropolitan area. But, in 2025, the apparent capital of contemporary wildfires interfacing with highly populated metropolitan centers was California, specifically the city of Los Angeles, where some of the worst wildfires in California history erupted onJanuary 7, 2025, in the Pacific Palisades and later in Altadena. Senior Political and National Correspondent for MSNOW Jacob Soboroff covered those fires as they burned and has now recounted that experience and analyzed its meaning in Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster (HarperCollins, 2026).
Soboroff is an accomplished correspondent, who has covered both natural and human-made disasters. His previous book, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy (2020), detailed the first Trump Administration's systematic separation of immigrant families at the border and exposed the policy's devastating impact. He is also an LA native and resident, who brings to this account a personal story of family and community impacted by apparently unexpected (but perfectly predictable) calamity. His on-air coverage, faithfully recorded in the book, and his depictions of his experience covering the fire in the places where he grew up among others he had grown up with give this book an intensely personal feel, simultaneously celebrating rootedness and lamenting loss. In this age of delocalized globalism, with its endemic loss of commitments to places and local communities, Soboroff's account offers unexpected inspiration, even as it recounts a catastrophic calamity and countless personal, familial, and neighborhood experiences of loss. At one point, surveying the somehow still standing synagogue where he had once had his Bar Mitzvah, Soboroff acknowledged, "I felt I was exactly where I was supposed to be."
The January 2025 Firestorm was the result of a deadly combination of high wind gusts, low humidity, and accumulated dry vegetation. As difficult as were the personal losses and environmental devastation Soboroff recounts is his on-site, real-time reporting on how certain prominent public figures responded to the disaster. California Governor Gavin Newsom and lame-duck President Joe Biden (who just happened to be on the scene when the fires started) both responded creditably, as we used to expect al our public officials to do. Elon Musk, however, posted misinformation on his social platform "X," and President-elect Donald Trump falsely claimed that Governor Newsom was withholding water that should have been available to fight the fires.
Obviously, the most compelling parts of the book are scenes of turmoil which Soboroff describes so well, his interviews with first responders struggling to maneuver fire trucks running out of fuel and hydrants low on water pressure, and his poignant conversations with those who lost virtually everything in a moment of horror. No less important, however, ishis treatment of the terrible political context — not just Trump’s spreading misinformation about the fires and berating the Governor and other officials for being ineffective — but also the policies of the second Trump administration in the months since the fires to “refute, dismantle, or outright eliminate valuable resources within the federal government’s arsenal to communicate about, respond to, mitigate, or prevent disasters.”
As contributing factors to the 2025 LA tragedy and also setting the stage for the future, he identifies the global climate emergency, infrastructure disintegration, the changes in the ways we now live, and our politics of blame and disinformation. That is what makes his riveting account of last year's calamity in California a warning and a challenging portent about "America's New Age of Disaster."
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