RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"Revelatory ... With forensic precision, Born in Flames dismantles this pernicious fiction—not just by identifying the real culprits, but by showing how arson was built into the political economy of the late-20th-century city. Ansfield demonstrates that these fires were the inevitable byproduct of a racialized financial logic that remade urban America ... 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.\
Edouard Louis, Trans. by Lorin Stein
PositiveThe New Republic\"Louis offers damning realism in the service of structural critique ... At first glance, coming in at just over a hundred pages, Who Killed My Father seems slighter, less momentous than [Louis’s] previous work... It quickly becomes clear, however, that the new book has a force and immediacy all its own ... If The End of Eddy gave the French literary public a window onto the social world of people they didn’t know existed (or whose existence they had gladly ignored), Who Killed My Father is a crucial text for a moment when those people are refusing to die quietly ... Perhaps the son, improbably, has been able to resuscitate his father.\
