A fittingly fiery exposé of a disaster that could have been avoided, or at least mitigated.
A CBS News national correspondent condemns the unforced errors that made the destructive L.A. fires of 2025 all the worse.
It takes time, Barack Obama warned, for a community to recover from disaster, discarding poor prior practices and experimenting with new ones. Vigliotti’s on-the-ground account suggests that at least some of the Los Angeles fire disaster of 2025 was the result of a rush to rebuild in the same old ways and in the same dangerous places after the previous devastating fire of 2018. That hurry, he writes, has certainly been at play in the aftermath of the 2025 fire and its demand for speedy recovery, because the 2028 Olympics are slated to be held in Los Angeles, and politicians will pay a price if the venue has to be changed for lack of that recovery—especially L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, but also Governor Gavin Newsom. Preparing for the Olympics has included a costly and ineffective effort to remove homeless people from the city’s streets, which, among other programs, diverted significant funds from the L.A. Fire Department—and, as one firefighter said, “we still have nearly 100 broken-down fire engines, trucks and ambulances sitting in the maintenance yard because of those cuts.” Those vehicles could have come in handy amid cascading failures that, the author writes, included lack of leadership (Bass was in Ghana when the fire that ravaged the Palisades neighborhood broke out, though she had ample warning of its likelihood), lack of coordinated communications, lack of firefighters and equipment in the face of ever-worsening climate change and the blazes it fuels. That chain of failures, Vigliotti writes, instantly took on a political dimension, with firefighters rendered as “collateral in a political war.” The fire is now out, but the gold rush is on: Even as future conflagrations loom, speculators have bought up the ash-covered lots, “cashing in on ruin.”
A fittingly fiery exposé of a disaster that could have been avoided, or at least mitigated.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9781668219034
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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