
Breathing Fire
Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California's Wildfires
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Narrated by:
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Frankie Corzo
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Jaime Lowe
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By:
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Jaime Lowe
About this listen
This program features a bonus clip with archival recordings from several of the inmate firefighters and the author.
A dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires.
Shawna was overcome by the claustrophobia, the heat, the smoke, the fire, all just down the canyon and up the ravine. She was feeling the adrenaline, but also the terror of doing something for the first time. She knew how to run with a backpack; they had trained her physically. But that’s not training for flames. That’s not live fire.
California’s fire season gets hotter, longer, and more extreme every year - fire season is now year-round. Of the thousands of firefighters who battle California’s blazes every year, roughly 30 percent of the on-the-ground wildland crews are inmates earning a dollar an hour. Approximately 200 of those firefighters are women serving on all-female crews.
In Breathing Fire, Jaime Lowe expands on her revelatory work for The New York Times Magazine. She has spent years getting to know dozens of women who have participated in the fire camp program and spoken to captains, family and friends, correctional officers, and camp commanders. The result is a rare, illuminating look at how the fire camps actually operate - a story that encompasses California’s underlying catastrophes of climate change, economic disparity, and historical injustice, but also draws on deeply personal histories, relationships, desires, frustrations, and the emotional and physical intensity of firefighting.
Lowe’s reporting is a groundbreaking investigation of the prison system, and an intimate portrayal of the women of California’s Correctional Camps who put their lives on the line, while imprisoned, to save a state in peril.
A Macmillan Audio production from MCD
©2021 Jaime Lowe (P)2021 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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A Hard Listen
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Only one star for performance because the quality of the recording was so poor. This was no fault of the reader who did an outstanding job. Audible you need to fix this!
Informative, captivating and pertinent.
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Excellent
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So good I'm sharing it/recommending it to friends,
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A deeply human and widely historic story
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My only complaint was that the editing of the narration indicated sections of the book, in fact sometimes as small as a few words or a sentence, we’re recorded at different times under different conditions, and the quality of the audio and volume fluctuated in very distracting manners. I wish the audio had been more consistent.
Sober and personal look at the California inmate fire experience
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A must read/listen!
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Obviously relevant.
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The story is interesting, but they have the author and another woman listed as readers. One of them is doing most of the reading, I guess, but she either really changes her voice for a sentence or two (or even just a few words) for no apparent reason or the other woman reads those lines. It's not to act like she's talking as someone else to emphasize that person's words...at one point she was just describing what one of the women was wearing. It's jarring and totally unnecessary. It's almost like they recorded it before the author finished the physical book then went back and dubbed in parts that she added on a final edit or something...then the narrator forgot what voice she used, couldn't do that voice again for some reason, or they couldn't get her and used someone else. Glad I used a credit and didn't actually buy it.
08/08/21: Okay, I finished the book...there are a couple of other issues besides all the weird voice changes that continued throughout the book. At one point the author wrote about the first ever woman firefighter from NY, Molly Williams...she's talking about having a scarf wound around her head. The narrator pronounced it like a wound on the body! WTH?! And the narrator is an American actress (which makes the bizarre voice cuts all the weirder), so it's not a matter of how someone from another country might pronounce a word differently. Then in the epilogue, the narrator says, "On Friday, September 11th, 2022, Governor Newsom..." Really?! 2022?!?! I have no idea if it's written that way in the physical book, but that is a glaring mistake since it's currently 2021! The one reason it's nice to have the Audible version is you get to hear snippets of the interviews with the actual women at the end.
The narration issues aside, this is a really good book that highlights more changes are needed in the criminal justice and prison systems, including preparing inmates for release. Paying the inmates so little for doing such a dangerous job is insulting to say the least. And to train them and for many give them a career they want to continue once released then give them little to no opportunity to compete for those jobs is just ridiculous. As one person said, if we can give them all these tools that could be potential weapons and send them out to work, maybe they shouldn't have been in prison in the first place. It's interesting that when the first women's prison was establish, it had a female board and the focus was on training the women for careers once they were out. As soon as it was transferred under the control of the men's board, that disappeared. Of course with private for-profit prisons, rehabilitation and training will never happen. Things have to change in this country.
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4 stars on performance because there were points where the audio was obviously spliced in that were a bit jarring, otherwise author was great.
Heartbreaking story of the plight of the incarcerated and women in general
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