The 2025 Los Angeles wildfires (“Great Los Angeles Fires”) are treated as a turning point that makes an abstract climate future painfully real in the present.npr+2​

Soboroff uses his own experience as an NBC News correspondent covering the destruction of his childhood neighborhood, Pacific Palisades, to explore how disaster collapses past, present, and future into a single emotional moment.latimes+1​

The narrative argues that these fires inaugurate what he calls America’s New Age of disaster: a period when mega‑fires, floods, and other climate‑fueled events become frequent, overlapping, and politically destabilizing.barnesandnoble+2​

The book highlights systemic failures: underprepared infrastructure, stressed firefighting systems, confused chains of command, and the difficulty of coordinating local, state, and federal agencies during a fast‑moving catastrophe.npr+2​

It shows how real‑time disinformation and social‑media rumor spread alongside the flames, complicating evacuation, emergency communication, and public understanding of risk.latimes​

Firefighters, evacuees, scientists, and political leaders are presented as interlocking perspectives, making the catastrophe not just a spectacle but a web of human decisions and vulnerabilities.npr+1​

The opening chapters unfold almost like a thriller, with escalating alerts, wind warnings, and rapidly shifting conditions, to convey how quickly a “normal” day becomes irreversible tragedy.latimes​

Soboroff insists that what looks like a “natural disaster” is in fact the product of policy choices: land‑use decisions, utility management, climate policy, and long‑term political neglect.npr+1​

The book links Los Angeles’ fires to broader national issues—immigration crackdowns, social inequality, and political polarization—arguing that disasters expose pre‑existing fractures in American society.latimes+1​

Personal grief for a lost hometown sits beside journalistic distance; he reflects on how one reports “objectively” when one’s own memories, family, and community are burning.latimes​

The surviving New Deal–era recreation center in Pacific Palisades, with a plaque listing his parents and neighbors, becomes a symbol of both continuity and loss, a physical remnant around which questions of memory and rebuilding gather.latimes​

The narrative emphasizes the physical and psychological exhaustion of sustained disaster coverage: back‑to‑back fires, sleepless nights, and the cumulative emotional strain on reporters and residents.npr+1​

The book suggests that disaster may briefly soften political divisions—such as when Soboroff is asked to check on the home of the in‑laws of a prominent Trump adviser—but that these moments of unity tend not to last.latimes​

Technological systems (weather modeling, power grids, firefighting aircraft, news networks) are shown as both impressive and fragile, capable of heroism but also of cascading failure when stressed.npr+1​

By reconstructing events almost minute‑by‑minute, Soboroff wants readers to feel how much in a disaster is decided in a handful of hours: whether warnings are heeded, lines are cut, roads are closed, or messages are believed.npr+1​

The fires are framed as a warning that the “future” catastrophes scientists have long predicted have already arrived, and that doing nothing will normalize a cycle of ever‑worse events.barnesandnoble+2​

At the same time, the book portrays acts of resilience: cooperation among neighbors, relentless work by firefighters, and efforts by city leaders to rethink rebuilding rather than simply restoring the status quo.npr+1​

Soboroff uses the story of one city to raise questions for the whole country: How should communities build, insure, and govern in an era when the climate baseline has changed?barnesandnoble+2​

The account doubles as a meditation on journalism itself—its limits, responsibilities, and the tension between live coverage and the slower work of historical understanding.latimes+1​

Immersive narrative style: Early chapters read with the pace of a thriller, drawing general readers into what might otherwise be a technical policy subject.npr+1​

First‑person credibility: As a correspondent on the ground and a native of the destroyed neighborhood, Soboroff combines eyewitness detail with emotional insight.latimes+1​

Multi‑perspective reporting: Firefighters, residents, scientists, and politicians all appear, which prevents the story from becoming a single‑angle memoir.npr+1​

Timeliness: It is one of the first substantial books on the 2025 LA fires, published around their first anniversary, which gives it immediacy and documentary value.barnesandnoble+2​

Conceptual frame (“New Age of Disaster”): The phrase offers a memorable way to think about the linkage between climate change, infrastructure, and politics.barnesandnoble+2​

Scope constraints: Focusing tightly on Los Angeles and on a brief window of time may underplay fires and climate impacts in other regions or over longer historical arcs.latimes+1​

Subjective vantage point: The strong first‑person framing means the book’s emotional and interpretive lens is very much Soboroff’s; some readers may wish for more detached analysis or comparative data.npr+1​

Early entry into the record: Arriving so soon after the event, it cannot incorporate longer‑term investigations, scientific studies, or full policy outcomes that may emerge years later.barnesandnoble+2​

Possible underdevelopment of solutions: Reviews emphasize the vivid narrative more than detailed policy prescriptions, suggesting that readers seeking a technocratic blueprint may find this aspect relatively thin.harpercollins+2​

It addresses climate‑driven disaster as a present reality in a major American city rather than a distant or rural phenomenon, making the stakes legible to a wide audience.barnesandnoble+2​

The book illuminates how media, misinformation, and political polarization shape people’s experience of catastrophe, which has implications beyond wildfires—from pandemics to floods and heat waves.latimes+1​

For historians and general readers alike, it functions as an early narrative “first draft” of a major urban disaster, likely to be consulted as later studies and policy debates unfold.barnesandnoble+2​

Its focus on infrastructure, governance, and community resilience makes it pertinent to ongoing discussions about how American cities should adapt building codes, zoning, and emergency planning in an altered climate.barnesandnoble+2​