A personal 'Firestorm'

In the first book about the Palisades and Eaton fires, MS Now's Jacob Soboroff reflects on covering the disaster that destroyed his childhood home

- BY MARIELLA RUDI

ERIC THAYER Los Angeles Times JACOB SOBOROFF, author of "Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster," stands in Altadena.

If journalism is the first draft of history, TV news is a rough, improbable sketch.

As last year's wildfires multiplied, still 0% contained, field reporters — tasked with articulating the unintelligible on camera — grieved alongside Los Angeles in real time.

"What are you supposed to say when the entire community you were born and raised in is wiped off the map, literally burning to the ground before your eyes?" Jacob Soboroff writes in "Firestorm," out in early January ahead of the Palisades and Eaton fires' first anniversary. "I couldn't come up with much."

Mariner

Viewers saw that struggle Jan. 8, 2025. Soboroff, then an NBC News national correspondent, briefly broke the fourth wall while trying to describe the destruction of his former hometown, Pacific Palisades.

"Firestorm," the first book about the Great Los Angeles Fires of 2025, pulls readers inside Soboroff's reporter's notebook and the nearly two relentless weeks he spent covering the Palisades and subsequent Eaton wildfire.

"Fire, it turns out, can be a remarkable time machine," he writes, "a curious form of teleportation into the past and future all at once."

The book argues the future long predicted arrived the morning of Jan. 7. The costliest wildfire event in American history, so far, was compounded by cascading failures and real-time disinformation, ushering in what Soboroff calls America's New Age of Disaster: "Every aspect of my childhood flashed before my eyes, and, while I'm not sure I understood it as I stared into the camera ... I saw my children's future, too, or at least some version of it."