... 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 ... Lowe vividly paints the realities of present-day firefighting. Her precise descriptions of sensory details...and firefighting and inmate lingo make readers feel as if they’re in camp with the women, jumping out of bunks at the 3 a.m. siren and piling into a buggy to race off toward a roaring wildfire ... Breathing Fire doesn’t shy away from complicated truths.
... remarkable ... Lowe writes with an affection for the women with whom she spent four years while writing Breathing Fire. As readers get to know Carla, Selena, Sonya, Marquet, Whitney and Alisha and the families who love and worry over them, she brings into sharp relief how an entire class of people are performing labor under conditions approaching complete enslavement. Her important book also points to the uncomfortable truth that the front lines of the fight against climate change are peopled with those society has forgotten.
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 ... By telling this worthy story the author shows the need for reform that would let these women who risk their lives benefit more from the experience after prison.
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 ... the book is at its strongest when it leaves aside the statistics and stays focused on the lives of prisoners as they train to fight wildfires, reflect on their crimes, and struggle to find gainful employment after prison. The result is a powerful and affecting portrait of the 'inherent flaws' of using prison labor to save California from climate disaster.
A detailed and infuriating depiction of America’s inhumane practice of deploying inmate firefighters. In this expansion of her work for the New York Times Magazine, journalist Lowe delves into the stories of the incarcerated women fighting California’s frequent, deadly wildfires. At great personal risk, these women remain prisoners as they battle flames and endure grueling physical challenges ... The stories share horrifying, dehumanizing parallels with slave labor—especially analogous given the disproportionate number of American prisoners who are Black. However, Lowe does not examine race until halfway through the book, which weakens the critical and rhetorical power of the story as a whole ... Nevertheless, Lowe writes compellingly ... A disturbing portrayal of America’s exploitative prison system and the incarcerated women fighting California’s wildfires.
