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How a City Was Left to Burn, and the Olympic Rush to Rebuild L.A.
by Jonathan Vigliotti
CBS News correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti's searing firsthand account of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, the failures that fueled the catastrophe, and the high-stakes battle over how the city will rebuild ahead of the 2028 Olympic Games.
In Torched, Vigliotti brings readers inside the inferno that devastated Los Angeles, weaving on-the-ground reporting with the deeper story of how a century of unchecked development and political mismanagement set the stage for disaster. With clarity and verve, he recounts the chaos of the fire, the flawed emergency response, and the human stories of survival and loss in the city he loves.
But this is more than a chronicle of destruction. Vigliotti unravels this catastrophe by placing it within the larger history of Los Angeles, a city that has in many ways been defined by its attraction to reinvention and deference to those who "move fast and break things"—an impulse that now puts it at risk of a short-sighted post-fire rebuild in the run-up to the 2028 Olympic Games. A future that might maximize profits but could potentially do too little to prevent similar disasters in the future or address the rampant inequities this blaze brought to global attention.
Urgent, unflinching, and deeply reported, Torched captures Los Angeles at a turning point—and reveals why its choices matter for us all.
"A fittingly fiery exposé of a disaster that could have been avoided, or at least mitigated." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Riveting…gripping…a dystopian account of a government's disregard for the well-being of its people." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A comprehensive, page-turning account of one of the most physically and politically complex weather disasters in American history. Vigliotti was on scene from the Palisades Fire's first moments, and it feels like he's everywhere, reporting with the authority and scope of a deeply embedded local who understands LA's political machinery as intimately he does its neighborhoods, its history -- and the 'statistical certainty' of catastrophic fire. If you read one book on this epic, era-defining urban fire, make it this one." —John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather
"A tenacious, deeply reported account of the fires that ravaged Los Angeles in 2025. Blending frontline reporting with the layered history of the city itself, he reveals how political inaction and institutional failure fanned the flames of catastrophe, repeating the mistakes of the past and imprinting those failures on the future. An essential examination of a modern disaster, Torched stands as both a reckoning and a warning, with consequences that extend far beyond Southern California." —Nathalia Holt, author of Rise of the Rocket Girls and The Beast in the Clouds
This information about Torched was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jonathan Vigliotti is an Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award–winning CBS News national correspondent whose work has appeared on numerous platforms including CBS Sunday Morning, Face the Nation, 48 Hours, and more. His reporting has taken him to more than forty countries and territories across six continents. Follow him on X @JonVigliotti. He is the author of Torched and Before It's Gone.
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