During the 1970s, the share of New York City fires attributed to arson soared to 7 percent from 1 percent, but Joe Flood blames a culprit 2,500 miles away for the firestorm that destroyed 97 percent of the buildings in seven Bronx census tracts. His compelling research resonates in another era of budget-cutting and data-driven decision-making.
In “The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City — And Determined the Future of Cities” (Riverhead, $26.95), Mr. Flood, a journalist, argues that much of the blame belongs to the computer experts of the New York City-RAND Institute, who were hired by the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay to make the Fire Department more efficient.
The joint project of the mayor’s office and the Santa Monica, Calif.-based research organization resulted in, among other recommendations, the closing of some fire companies in the South Bronx on the loopy theory that response times would not grow much longer. Mr. Flood also makes a case that David Berkowitz, the killer known as Son of Sam, might have been captured much earlier if fire marshals, some of whom were staking him out, had not been cut.
(“Rather than tell the city what to do, our models were tools that helped the Fire Department’s leaders test their ideas about how to best allocate limited resources,” a RAND spokesman said last week. “The models did not suggest closing fire companies as the only possible solution.”)
Mr. Flood sometimes overreaches in his sweeping indictment of the false precision that statistics generally can suggest — concerning crime and educational testing, for example — and the dangers of using them as the basis for future decision-making. His book is at its best when it sticks to the Bronx and the fires there.
How many books can one building inspire? At least one more, and we’re lucky to have it. Jane Ziegelman’s “97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement” (Smithsonian, $25.99) is a welcome addition to the canon inspired by the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side, the institution that occupies that address. Ms. Ziegelman will direct the forthcoming culinary program there.
In the book, she dishes delectable morsels of ethnic gastronomy drawn from five of the families who lived at 97 Orchard, and from neighborhoods that were home to millions of newcomers from Germany, Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe. Jews, for example, raised poultry in basements and backyards, and Germans feasted on herring at picnics uptown.
Menus, recipes and reminiscences of vanished culinary workers (including German krauthobblers, who went door to door slicing cabbage for homemade sauerkraut) further enliven the narrative of this thoroughly researched book. The immigrant culinary revolution that Ms. Ziegelman describes continues to enrich and tantalize America.
Starting in 1995, David Chura taught English to a captive audience of high school students in the Westchester County jail. “Fortunately — and unfortunately — our enrollment, stable at about 120, was never threatened,” he writes. “Kids got in trouble, police arrested them, and the districts paid for their education.”
In riveting detail, Mr. Chura tells their stories in “I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup” (Beacon, $24.95). It’s an indictment of the system.
His warts-and-all account profiles inmates like Anna, a drug baroness, whose new goal is a master’s degree, and Jonathan, who tenderly cares for a lame baby chick. Mr. Chura learns to claim small victories, like getting Warren to read. “At least for the hours he was reading, he was staying out of trouble,” Mr. Chura writes.
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