It may seem politically incorrect to say so, but one of the (very) few positives to come out of the terrorist attacks on New York City on September 11, 2001, was the improved stature, in the minds of citizens and government alike, of the city’s firefighters. Those of us who witnessed or survived that period remember it as one in which firemen (and, surprisingly rarely, women) were lauded both publicly and privately. It was not uncommon for locals to leave notes and flowers near firehouses that had lost people that day, or for those who had behaved heroically and survived. For months after the attacks, average citizens would go to restaurants and, seeing a table full of rescue workers (many of them from the firehouses) nearby, promptly pick up their check. Firemen were the new, and maybe the only, heroes of that era, a time in which government and corporations seemed to fail us, when the individual act of bravery was the only one we could count on.

However, it was not ever thus, certainly not in New York City—as Joe Flood’s magnificent The Fires makes clear. Gotham in the late 1960s and early 1970s was an economic and social ruin. Crime was rampant, the city was broke: Every New Yorker remembers the headline about President Gerald Ford telling the city to “drop dead,” before eventually giving the almost-in-default state government funds. Something had to be done, and the wisdom of the age suggested that that “something” should be a modern, futuristic, examination of the city’s situation. Enter the RAND Corporation, an outfit known for its computer-generated analyses and its success in high-level military operations, even in the just completed war. (Talk about the military industrial complex!) Surely there was a system, an algorithm, a plan that could be implemented to save the city.

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