Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California's Wildfires

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. InBreathing Fire, Jaime Lowe expands on her revelatory work forThe 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.

Biographies & Memoirs

Lowe, Jaime

Community & Culture

A riveting memoir and a fascinating investigation of the history, uses, and controversies behind lithium, an essential medication for millions of people struggling with bipolar disorder. It began in Los Angeles in 1993, when Jaime Lowe was just sixteen. She stopped sleeping and eating, and began to hallucinate—demonically cackling Muppets, faces lurking in windows, Michael Jackson delivering messages from the Neverland Underground. Lowe wrote manifestos and math equations in her diary, and drew infographics on her bedroom wall. Eventually, hospitalized and diagnosed as bipolar, she was prescribed a medication that came in the form of three pink pills—lithium. In Mental, Lowe shares and investigates her story of episodic madness, as well as the stability she found while on lithium. She interviews scientists, psychiatrists, and patients to examine how effective lithium really is and how its side effects can be dangerous for long-term users—including Lowe, who after twenty years on the medication suffers from severe kidney damage. Mental is eye-opening and powerful, tackling an illness and drug that has touched millions of lives and yet remains shrouded in social stigma. Now, while she adjusts to a new drug, her pursuit of a stable life continues as does her curiosity about the history and science of the mysterious element that shaped the way she sees the world and allowed her decades of sanity. Lowe travels to the Bolivian salt flats that hold more than half of the world’s lithium reserves, rural America where lithium is mined for batteries, and tolithium spas that are still touted as a tonic to cure all ills. With unflinching honesty and humor, Lowe allows a clear-eyed view into her life, and an arresting inquiry into one of mankind’s oldest medical mysteries.

Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Mental Health

Blue Rider Press

Ol' Dirty Bastard (aka Russell Jones) rose to fame with the Wu-Tang Clan in the early 1990s, his unorthodox rap style and reputation for erratic behavior putting him in the media spotlight. As a solo artist, he released two albums that went gold and achieved crossover fame through a duet with Mariah Carey that debuted at number one on theBillboard charts. But for the next decade, his life would be fueled by chaos and excess until it derailed completely, resulting in a fatal drug overdose in 2004. Digging for Dirt explores ODB's life, career, mythology, death, and the troubled trajectory of his public and private worlds. Jaime Lowe met with the people ODB affected and was most affected by--surviving members of the Wu-Tang Clan, his hip-hop contemporaries, his parents, his managers, and his friends--in an attempt to figure out the man behind the clown-prince persona, and the issues of race, celebrity, mental illness, and exploitation that surrounded his rise and fall.

Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB

Arts & Literature

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

A fan's exploration of the man behind the myth
Ol' Dirty Bastard (aka Russell Jones) rose to fame with the Wu-Tang Clan in the early '90s, his unorthodox rap style and reputation for erratic behavior putting him in a media spotlight. As a solo artist, he released two albums that went gold and achieved crossover fame through a duet with Mariah Carey that debuted at number one on the Billboard charts. But for the next decade, his life would be fueled by chaos and excess until it derailed completely, resulting in a fatal drug overdose in 2004 and leaving behind an enigmatic legacy and a remarkably diverse group of fans. 
In a compelling combination of personal narrative, biography, and cultural criticism, Digging for Dirt explores ODB's life, career, mythology, death, and the troubled trajectory of his public and private worlds. Jaime Lowe met with the people ODB affected and was most affected by―surviving members of the Wu-Tang Clan, his hip-hop contemporaries, his parents, his followers, his managers, his neighbors, and his friends―in an attempt to figure out the man behind the clown-prince persona, and the issues of race, celebrity, mental illness, and exploitation that surrounded his rise and fall.

A dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires.\nShawna 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.\nCalifornia’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.\nIn 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.\nLowe’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.

Picador

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lowe, Jaime. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Lowe, Jaime

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lowe, Jaime. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California's Wildfires

Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB

Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB

Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California's Wildfires