Torched: How a City Was Left to Burn, and the Olympic Rush to Rebuild L.A.

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.

About the Author :
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.

Review :
"Riveting…gripping…a dystopian account of a government’s disregard for the well-being of its people.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review "A fittingly fiery exposé of a disaster that could have been avoided, or at least mitigated."
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Wildfires don’t just take homes—they take histories, neighborhoods, and the deep sense of safety that makes a place feel like home. In telling the story of the Palisades Fire, Jonathan Vigliotti centers the voices that matter most: the families who ran from the flames, the neighbors who helped one another survive, and the communities still living with what was lost. For decades, I’ve fought for communities poisoned, misled, or abandoned by systems that put profit and convenience before people. Wildfires belong in that same fight. This book demands that we stop accepting devastation as normal. It challenges us to ask harder questions about cause, responsibility, and prevention—because how we respond to wildfires now will determine who pays the price next.”
—Erin Brockovich

“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

“Torched is a political autopsy. Jonathan picks up the history of a unique community that had set its course on an inevitable path to destruction through poor development practices coupled with the gross negligence of the City of Los Angeles.”
— Randy Young, Pacific Palisades Historian