About the Book
With a 1000 degree fire burning her hair and melting her skin, her lungs filling with hot acrid smoke, 13-year old Michele McBride jumped from the second story window of the Our Lady of Angels School onto a concrete alley and into a life she could never have anticipated. This is the story of the "other Chicago fire," the one that consumed 92 grade school children and three Roman Catholic nuns and traumatized a West Side neighborhood for decades. Yet Michele McBride's story is also an inspiring biography of courage and recovery. The reader will be pulling for Michele at every eventful turn of her all too short life.
Reviewers Comments
" . . A very moving, very terrifying account of what it was like to nearly die in an inferno and how it is to live afterward inside a burn victim's flawed body." -Chicago Tribune "Michele McBride's book is not a denunciation of anyone, but instead is an effort to divert her anger into constructive channels . . . And in a brief emotional final chapter, she points our what mistakes and oversights were made, so that school officials can make good use of the terrible lessons she and others have learned since that tragic day." - The American School Board Journal "In 1974 Michele began a cathartic project deflecting her bitterness into researching and writing The Fire That Will Not Die. Her book became a best-seller in Chicago soon after it hit the stores." - People Magazine
