memoir

This week, we are jumping into the fire with Kelly Ramsey. Her new book, “Wildfire Days: A Woman, A Hotshot Crew, and The Burning American West,” chronicles her time fighting some of the state’s most dangerous conflagrations alongside an all-male crew of Hotshots. The elite wildland firefighters are tasked with applying their tactical knowledge to tamp down the biggest fires in the state. We also look at recent releases reviewed by Times critics. And a local bookseller tells us what our next great read should be.

In 2017, Ramsey found herself in a holding pattern. Living in Austin, with an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh under her belt, she didn’t know what or where she wanted to be. So she took a nanny job. “I was spending all my time outdoors with these kids,” she told me. “I thought, is there a job that would allow me to be outside all the time?”

Ramsey landed a volunteer summer gig working on a fire trail crew in Happy Camp, Northern California, on the Klamath River. While Ramsey was learning the delicate art of building firebreaks, a large fire broke out just outside the town. “My introduction to California that summer was filled with smoke,” says the author. “This is when I got the bug, when I started to become interested in fighting fires.”

Ramsey became a qualified firefighter in 2019, joining an entirely male crew of fellow Hotshots. Ramsey’s book “Wildfire Days” is the story of that fraught and exciting time. We talked to Ramsey about the “bro culture” of fire crews, the adrenaline surge of danger and the economic hardships endured by these frontline heroes.

Below, read our interview with Ramsey, who you can see at Vroman’s on June 23. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)

✍️ Author Chat

Ramsey details how she became a qualified firefighter in 2019, when she joined an entirely male wildland fire crew, in her new book.

(Lindsey Shea; Scribner)

What was it like when you confronted a big fire for the first time?

It was the Bush fire in Arizona. I was so incredulous, just marveling at what was happening. “Look at that smoke,” and “that helicopter is making a water drop.” It was kind of a rookie move, because all the other crew members had seen it thousands of times. To see a helicopter up close making a drop, it looks like this gorgeous waterfall. I had to get acclimated to the epic nature of fires. And that wasn’t even a big fire, really.

In the book, you talk about entering into a pretty macho culture. How difficult was it for you to gain acceptance into this cloistered male world of the fire crew?

It was definitely shocking at first, to be in an entirely male space. The Forest Service had some sexual harassment scandals in 2017, so everyone was on their best behavior at first. It took me some time before I was accepted into the group. I had to perform over-the-top, irrefutably great, just to prove to them that I was OK. It’s an unfair standard, but that’s the way it was. I wanted to shift the way they saw women, or have better conversations about gender and fire.

You write about the pride and stoicism of the fire crew members, the ethos of actions rather than words. No one brags or whines, you just get on with it. Why?

When my editor was going through the book, he insisted that I mention the 75 pounds of gear I was always carrying on my back, and I resisted, because you don’t complain about that kind of thing when you’re out there. But I realized that readers would want to know these details, so I put them in. I was inclined to leave them out.

You also write about the difficulties of re-entering civilian life.

I don’t know of any firefighters who don’t struggle with the idea of living a normal, quiet life. It’s just a massive letdown after the adrenaline rush of the fire season.

What was shocking to me reading “Wildfire Days” is that fire crews are essentially paid minimum wage to work one of the most dangerous jobs in the state.

It was $16.33 an hour when I was in the crew. And most firefighters that I worked with didn’t have other jobs. They would take unemployment until the next fire season rolled around. You would just scrape by. During the first month of the season, everyone would be flat broke, eating cans of tuna. The joke is that you get paid in sunsets. But we all love being out there. The camaraderie is so intense and so beautiful.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

In this vintage photo, a man walks in front of the Italian Hall, constructed in 1908; all the structures on the block behind him have been demolished. A new book looks at Los Angeles in this time period.

(Angel City Press at the Los Angeles Public Library)

Hamilton Cain reviews National Book Award winner Susan Choi’s new novel, “Flashlight,” a mystery wrapped inside a fraught family drama. “With Franzen-esque fastidiousness,” Cain writes, “Choi unpacks each character’s backstory, exposing vanities and delusions in a cool, caustic voice, a 21st century Emile Zola.”

Jessica Ferri chats with Melissa Febos about her new memoir, “The Dry Season,” about the year she went celibate and discovered herself anew. Febos wonders aloud why more women aren’t more upfront with their partners about opting out of sex: “This radical honesty not only benefits you but it also benefits your partner. To me, that’s love: enthusiastic consent.”

Carole V. Bell reviews Maria Reva’s “startling metafictional” novel, “Endling,” calling it “a forceful mashup of storytelling modes that call attention to its interplay of reality and fiction — a Ukrainian tragicomedy of errors colliding with social commentary about the Russian invasion.”

Nick Owchar interviews Nathan Marsak about the reissue (from local publisher Angel City Press) of “Los Angeles Before The Freeways: Images of an Era, 1850-1950,” a book of vintage photos snapped by Swedish émigré Arnold Hylen and curated by Marsak. Owchar calls the book “an engrossing collection of black-and-white images of a city in which old adobe structures sit between Italianate office buildings or peek out from behind old signs, elegant homes teeter on the edge of steep hillsides, and routes long used by locals would soon be demolished to make room for freeways.”

And sad news for book lovers everywhere, as groundbreaking gay author Edmund White died this week at 85.

📖 Bookstore Faves

Diesel, A Bookstore manager Kelsey Bomba tells us what’s flying off the shelves at the Westside bookseller.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

This week, we paid a visit to the Westside’s great indie bookstore Diesel, which has been a locus for the community in the wake of January’s Palisades fire. The store’s manager, Kelsey Bomba, tells us what’s flying off the store’s shelves.

What books are popular right now:

Right now, Ocean Vuong’s “The Emperor of Gladness” is selling a ton, as [well as] Miranda July’s “All Fours” and Barry Diller’s memoir, “Who Knew.”

What future releases are you excited about:

Because I loved V.E. Schwab’s “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue,” I’m excited to read her new book, “Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil.” “The Great Mann,” by Kyra Davis Lurie — we are doing an event with her on June 11.

What are the hardy perennials, the books that you sell almost all the time:

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series and the Elena Ferrante books, especially “My Brilliant Friend.”

Diesel, A Bookstore is located at 225 26th St., Suite 33, Santa Monica CA 90402.

The first film I saw in a theater was “The Love Bug,” Disney’s 1969 comedy about a sentient Volkswagen Beetle named Herbie and the motley team who race him to many a checkered flag. Although my memory is hazy, I recall my toddler’s delight: a car could think, move and communicate like a real person, even chauffeuring the romantic leads to their honeymoon. Nice Herbie!

Or not so nice. A decade later, Stanley Kubrick opened his virtuosic “The Shining” with fluid tracking shots of the same model of automobile headed toward the Overlook Hotel and a rendezvous with horror. Something had clicked. Caroline Fraser’s scorching, seductive “Murderland” chronicles the serial-killer epidemic that swept the U.S. in the 1970s and ’80s, focusing on her native Seattle and neighboring Tacoma, where Ted Bundy was raised. He drove a Beetle, hunting for prey. She underscores the striking associations between VWs and high-yield predators, as if the cars were accomplices, malevolent Herbies dispensing victims efficiently. (Bundy’s vehicle is now displayed in a Tennessee museum.) The book’s a meld of true crime, memoir and social commentary, but with a mission: to shock readers into a deeper understanding of the American Nightmare, ecological devastation entwined with senseless sadism. “Murderland” is not for the faint of heart, yet we can’t look away: Fraser’s writing is that vivid and dynamic.

She structures her narrative chronologically, conveyed in present tense, newsreel-style, evoking the Pacific Northwest’s woodsy tang and bland suburbia. Fraser came of age on Mercer Island, adjacent to Lake Washington’s eastern shore, across a heavily-trafficked pontoon bridge notorious for fatal crashes. Like the Beetle, the dangerous bridge threads throughout “Murderland,” braiding the author’s personal story with those of her cast. A “Star Trek” geek stuck in a rigid Christian Science family, she loathed her father and longed to escape.

In Tacoma, 35 miles to the south, Ted Bundy grew up near the American Smelting and Refining Co., which disgorged obscene levels of lead and arsenic into the air while netting millions for the Guggenheim dynasty before its 1986 closure. Bundy is the book’s charismatic centerpiece, a handsome, well-dressed sociopath in shiny patent-leather shoes, flitting from college to college, job to job, corpse to corpse. During the 1970s, he abducted dozens of young women, raping and strangling them on sprees across the country, often engaging in postmortem sex before disposing their bodies. He escaped custody twice in Colorado — once from a courthouse and another time from a jail — before he was finally locked up for good after his brutal attacks on Chi Omega sorority sisters at Florida State University.

Fraser depicts his bloody brotherhood with similar flair. Israel Keyes claimed Bundy as a hero. Gary Ridgway, the prolific “Green River Killer,” inhaled the same Puget Sound toxins. Randy Woodfield trawled I-5 in his 1974 Champagne Edition Beetle. As she observes of Richard Ramirez, Los Angeles’ “Night Stalker”: “He’s six foot one, wears black, and never smiles. He has a dead stare, like a shark. He doesn’t bathe. He has bad teeth. He’s about to go beserk.” But the archvillain is ASARCO, the mining corporation that dodged regulations, putting profitability over people. Fraser reveals an uncanny pattern of polluting smelters and the men brought up in their shadows, prone to mood swings and erratic tantrums. The science seems speculative until the book’s conclusion, where she highlights recent data, explicitly mapping links.

Caroline Fraser laments the lack of accountability that the wealthy Guggenheim family has faced for operating a company that spewed toxins in Tacoma air for decades.

(Hal Espen)

Her previous work, “Prairie Fires,” a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, won the Pulitzer Prize and other accolades. The pivot here is dramatic, a bit of formal experimentation as Fraser shatters the fourth wall, luring us from our comfort zone. While rooted in the New Journalism of Joan Didion and John McPhee, “Murderland” deploys a mocking tone to draw us in, scattering deadpan jokes among chapters: “In 1974 there are at least a half a dozen serial killers operating in Washington. Nobody can see the forest for the trees.” Fraser delivers a brimstone sermon worthy of a Baptist preacher at a tent revival, raging at plutocrats who ravage those with less (or nothing at all).

Her fury blazes beyond balance sheets and into curated spaces of elites. She singles out Roger W. Straus Jr., tony Manhattan publisher, patron of the arts and grandson of Daniel Guggenheim, whose Tacoma smelter may have scrambled Bundy’s brain. She mentions Straus’ penchant for ascots and cashmere jackets. She laments the lack of accountability. “Roger W. Straus Jr. completes the process of whitewashing the family name,” she writes. “Whatever the Sackler family is trying to do by collecting art and endowing museums, lifting their skirts away from the hundreds of thousands addicted and killed by prescription opioids manufactured and sold by their company — Purdue Pharma — the Guggenheims have already stealthily and handily accomplished.” Has Fraser met a sacred cow she wouldn’t skewer?

Those beautiful Cézannes and Picassos in the Guggenheim Museum can’t paper over the atrocities; the gilded myths of American optimism, our upward mobility and welcoming shores won’t mask the demons. “The furniture of the past is permanent,” she notes. “The cuckoo clock, the Dutch door, the daylight basement — humble horsemen of the domestic Apocalypse. The VWs, parked in the driveway.” “Murderland” is a superb and disturbing vivisection of our darkest urges, this summer’s premier nonfiction read.

Cain is a book critic and the author of a memoir, “This Boy’s Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.” He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

My favorite books fall into one of two categories: novels that immerse me in another world, or nonfiction works that transform how I see our world.

When I read the latter, I share what I learned from the book with my partner for months afterward. She jokes that these books become my personality, but it’s not really a joke. In grad school, a professor asked us to each share a fun fact about ourselves, and I shared that my favorite book is about parking minimums. (I was studying business, not urban planning, so no one else seemed to find this very “fun.”)

When given the chance to write this newsletter, I knew I had to convince subscribers to check out “Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World” by Henry Grabar. True to the title, it will change how you see the world — it did for me, at least.

Today, I talk to Grabar about why he became fascinated with parking policy, whether L.A. can pull off a car-free Summer Olympics in 2028 and how the current White House administration is affecting the future of American transportation. I also share some of my other favorite books about transportation and urban planning before checking out the latest news in the book world.

✍️ Author Chat

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

You cover various urban issues for Slate. Was there a book that inspired your interest in these topics?

The first thing I read about city planning that made me feel like this was a real subject of inquiry and study was Jane Jacobs’ famous book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” She even has a passage about parking lots as “border vacuums” and the way that they kind of suck the life out of the surrounding streets. I read that when I was probably 17.

My direct inspiration for “Paved Paradise” came more out of my reporting for Slate. It just seemed that beneath every single subject, there was a story about parking. Then I learned that many people in the field had already devoted their careers to studying parking. But that just meant there was a lot of interesting material there and a big gap between what professionals understood about the importance of parking and what the general public saw as its role.

‘Paved Paradise,’ by Henry Grabar

(Penguin Press)

You mentioned Jane Jacobs’ book. What are some of your lesser-known favorite books about transportation and urban planning?

“Family Properties” by Beryl Satter is a great book about race and housing in Chicago.

“Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age” by Lizabeth Cullen is a biography, but it’s also an urban renewal history that offers an interesting and nuanced perspective on the aims of the urban renewers.

“The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York” by Suleiman Osman holds many interesting lessons for our cities today.

As a famously sprawling city, L.A. features prominently in Paved Paradise. Since the book came out, city leaders have promoted the idea of a car-free Olympics. Do you think that’s feasible?

That would be great. I hope they stick to that aim. It’s going to be challenging, of course, but at the same time, if there’s one thing we know about mega-events, it’s just very, very difficult on a spatial level to get everybody where they’re going if everyone arrives in a single-family vehicle.

I was at the Olympics in Paris last year, where I met [L.A. Mayor] Karen Bass very briefly. She seemed inspired by what was happening there. But it’s hard to make a point-by-point comparison between Paris and Los Angeles because they’re such different cities. At the same time, I do think planners in L.A. grasp this will be a much more fun event if it can summon some of that public-spiritedness that was on display in Paris, where the venues and the fans zones were all connected, rather than these isolated sites that are only accessed by car.

Henry Grabar’s ‘Paved Paradise’ diagnoses the blight of parking.

(Lisa Larson-Walker)

Since you published your book, Donald Trump has returned to the White House. To what degree does the federal government affect how much, at a city level, we are able to chip away at our parking-dependent infrastructure?

The federal government is a huge player in the way our cities and streets look. There are a lot of city and county transportation departments wondering what will happen with these projects where money was allocated by Washington or they were expecting it to be allocated later.

If there’s any silver lining to it, to accomplish their transportation goals, cities are going to have to do more with less and rethink some of the policy decisions they’ve taken for granted that are in their control, like parking policy.

Is there another topic in this realm that you hope to turn into a book someday?

I’m working on another book that follows the construction of a series of multifamily buildings from start to finish. By embedding with these projects as they make their way through the acquisition of the land, the design of the building, the zoning, the permitting, the financing and finally the construction, I’ll be able to identify and illuminate some of the barriers to having enough housing that go beyond whether it is permitted by zoning, which I know is a hot topic in California.

I’m trying to look across the country because this is increasingly a national problem, and there are variations from place to place in the issues that come into play.

📚 Book Recs

Now for some other books that have, to varying degrees, become my personality…

“Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet” explains how highways affect wildlife in ways both obvious (roadkill) and obscure (traffic noise pushing birds away from their habitats). Author Ben Goldfarb also highlights the creative solutions road ecologists are coming up with to help animals navigate our car-centric world.

If you’ve had an address your whole life, you’ve probably never thought much about it. “The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power” changed that for me. Author Deirdre Mask digs into the consequences of not having an address, the dark reasoning behind why we began numbering homes and so much more.

In “Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation,” author Paris Marx pokes holes in many of the silver-bullet transportation solutions we have today, from autonomous vehicles to electric scooters, arguing these efforts often overlook the most vulnerable in our society and sometimes create more problems than they solve.

(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)

📰 The Week(s) in Books

President Biden at a campaign rally in Raleigh, N.C..

(Matt Kelley / Associated Press)

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s buzzy book about Joe Biden’s diminished capacities and the associated cover-up is “reads like a Shakespearean drama on steroids,” Leigh Haber writes in her review of “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” Times television and media business reporter Stephen Battaglio spoke with Tapper about the book. “I have never experienced the ability to get behind the scenes in so many different rooms as for these recountings as I was for this book,” the CNN anchor said. “I felt like people needed to get this off their chest. It was almost like they were unburdening themselves.”

Media mogul Barry Diller’s memoir, “Who Knew,” hit shelves this week. Here are the four biggest revelations.

In his new book, “Is a River Alive?,” Robert Macfarlane questions the way we treat nature by visiting three threatened rivers in different parts of the world.

With his 40th novel, “Nightshade,” out this week, author and former Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Connelly shared what keeps him writing at 68 years old.

In his new book, “Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine: The New Science of Achieving a Healthy Weight,” David A. Kessler argues Big Food has purposefully engineered ultraprocessed foods to be addictive. The Times spoke with Kessler, a former FDA commissioner, about healthy long-term weight-loss strategies, guidelines for using GLP-1s safely, the body-positivity movement and improving lifespan.

If you haven’t gotten enough book recs by this point in the newsletter, The Times has also compiled 30 must-read books for summer.