Nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Nonfiction Finalist for the Gotham Book Prize Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Shortlisted for the 2026 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Finalist for the Athenaeum of Philadelphia Literary Award One of The New York Times 's 100 Notable Books of 2025 A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2025 The Skipped History Podcast Best Book of the Year A Finalist for the 2026 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award “[R]evelatory…Deeply researched and masterfully told.” ―Brian Goldstone, New York Times Book Review The explosive account of the arson wave that hit the Bronx and other American cities in the 1970s―and its legacy today. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsulate an entire era in this nation’s urban history. Across that decade, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color. Yet as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in Born in Flames , the most destructive fires were not set by residents, as is commonly assumed, but by landlords looking to collect insurance payouts. Driven by perverse incentives―new government-sponsored insurance combined with tanking property values―landlords hired “torches,” mostly Black and Brown youth, to set fires in the buildings, sometimes with people still living in them. Tens of thousands of families lost their homes to these blazes, yet for much of the 1970s, tenant vandalism and welfare fraud stood as the prevailing explanations for the arson wave, effectively indemnifying landlords. Ansfield’s book, based on a decade of research, introduces the term “brownlining” for the destructive insurance practices imposed on poor communities of color under the guise of racial redress. Ansfield shows that as the FIRE industries―finance, insurance, and real estate― eclipsed manufacturing in the 1970s, they began profoundly reshaping Black and Brown neighborhoods, seeing them as easy sources of profit. At every step, Ansfield charts the tenant-led resistance movements that sprung up in the Bronx and elsewhere, as well as the explosion of popular culture around the fires, from iconic movies like The Towering Inferno to hit songs such as “Disco Inferno.” Ultimately, they show how similarly pernicious dynamics around insurance and race are still at play in our own era, especially in regions most at risk of climate shocks. 20 illustrations "[R]evelatory…The counternarrative Ansfield offers is as absorbing as it is enraging.… Ansfield structures these revelations with the pacing of a mystery, posing questions―Why did insurers keep paying out? Why did the very systems meant to prevent insurance fraud instead enable it?―that land with the force of plot twists.… Deeply researched and masterfully told, Born in Flames is a definitive account of how race, risk and exploitative real estate have shaped the American city." ― Brian Goldstone, New York Times Book Review "[F]ormidable…a deft, at times brilliant history…Ansfield’s great achievement is following the money, the thread linking the fortunes to the fires. This is the panoramic, it’s-all-connected view that racial-capitalism theory promises." ― Daniel Immerwahr, New Yorker "[D]isputes the long-held notion that tenants were responsible for many of the notorious fires that burned in New York City in the ’70s and ’80s, many of them in The Bronx. Instead, Ansfield places the blame on flawed and inadequate legislation and greedy landlords…More worrying, argues Ansfield, is that the inequality that fueled the fires in the 1970s hasn’t gone away." ― Gavin Newsham, New York Post "[S]ets the record straight…Like the best crime dramas, Born in Flames manages to be both diligent and engrossing." ― Tracy Rosenthal, The New Republic "Prodigious research… [keeps] readers attuned to the ways that finance and policy impact people’s lives and neighborhoods." ― Samuel Zipp, The Nation "[A]n eye-opening, myth-busting analysis of this little-known―and still relevant―episode in American urban history." ― Glenn C. Altschuler, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "For a book that is, at base, a story of the serpentine ways of the insurance industry, Born in Flames includes arresting images: children laid out unconscious on the sidewalk from smoke inhalation; a paranoid ‘fire broker', convinced his office was bugged, conducting a meeting in the men’s room. Ansfield has found a way to emphasize the moral in ‘moral hazard." ― Dan Piepenbring, Harper's "Doggedly researched and as gripping as a detective story, Born in Flames is a journey into the underworld of arson." ― David Help, Dissent "[O]utstanding… A strength of Born in Flames is the care and finesse with which Ansfield treats the lives that the fires scorched―much as Robert Caro, in T