About the Book
Book Blurb
Gods Of Fire
Ten-year-old Charles Maree crawls through a shattered grocery window during Miami’s 1968 riots. He ignores cash, jewelry, canned food — and grabs a box of tangerines. This first rebellion against a broken world starts his journey through a city where smoke-choked streets and racism burned hotter than flames. Thirty years later, he’d command Miami’s fire rescue teams. But between stood a different inferno: a department where white officers crowned themselves “gods,” punishing him for drinking tea or smiling too wide.
Battles Behind the Badge
Experience Maree’s world through his own words:
- A "Friday Setup" where officials target him and three others days before graduation
- The humiliation of filing his own teeth with a metal tool after being denied braces
- Night shifts saving overdose victims while colleagues whispered "bad attitude"
- The moment at Station 3, when white firefighters handcuffed a Black peer, he realized: This system wants me broken
Each chapter confronts the quiet violence of exclusion, where a wrong laugh or extra biscuit became grounds for “counseling.”
Miami’s Hidden Scars
This memoir maps a city’s secrets: bodies floating in Liberty City rock pits, segregated buses rolling past burning buildings, and the McDuffie riots where Maree worked ambulance duty. This is a journey that has just raw scenes from the projects where his mother locked him behind an iron door “like the gates of hell.” When retirement came, he traded his uniform for a mailroom at Camillus House. Why? “Some fires forge you,” he writes. “Others teach you to pass the hose.”
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Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged.
