Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago
    Unavailable
    Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago
    Unavailable
    Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago
    Ebook529 pages8 hours

    Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago

    By Eric Klinenberg

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Written by Scribd Editors

    A catastrophe that left more than seven hundred people dead, Heat Wave discusses the tragedy of the heat wave which hit Chicago in 1995 that buckled streets and took out entire power grids. After the disaster, a pattern of neglect in the city's infrastructure and response made this heat wave more than just a natural disaster—it was a city-wide failure.

    The isolation of the elderly and complete non-response in poor neighborhoods leaves them without power and vulnerable during one of the most dangerous heat waves in American history. In Heat Wave, author Eric Klinenberg does what he calls a "social autopsy," examining how city officials failed their poor citizens and focusing on how they ignored the most at-risk populations.

    Klinenberg doesn't only blame city officials, though, bringing attention to the people who died alone, behind locked doors with no contact from friends or family who could have helped them. He tries to reconcile the city officials' failings, the neighbors, and the family, who didn't do anything to prevent hundreds of people's deaths, and discuss how these issues still exist in our cities to this day.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateMay 6, 2015
    ISBN9780226276212
    Unavailable
    Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago
    Author

    Eric Klinenberg

    Eric Klinenberg is an associate professor of sociology at New York University. Author of the acclaimed Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Klinenberg has also written for The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and Slate.

    Read more from Eric Klinenberg

    Related to Heat Wave

    Related ebooks

    United States History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Ariana DeBose

      Nov 9, 2021

      Ariana DeBose
      18 min read

    • Article

      Drones Show Calif.'s Great White Sharks Are Closer Than You Think

      May 10, 2021

      LOS ANGELES — Carlos Gauna surveys the wind-blown waves off a popular Santa Barbara County beach. It is a cold, gray afternoon and only a few people are in the water: a father teaching his son to surf, a lone man wading in the whitewash. Gauna launch

      7 min read

    • Article

      Amazon’s Army

      Jun 16, 2021

      Amazon’s Army
      1 min read

    • Article

      No Parking Here

      Jan 1, 2016

      No Parking Here
      23 min read

    • Article

      The Advocate

      Nov 9, 2021

      CEO & EXECUTIVE EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Diane Anderson-Minshall EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, PRINT Neal Broverman EDITOR IN CHIEF Tracy E. Gilchrist DIGITAL DIRECTOR Alex Cooper SENIOR POLITICS EDITOR Trudy Ring MANAGING EDITOR Desirée Guerrero ASSOCIATE EDITORS D

      1 min read

    • Article

      Our New Climate Reality

      Nov 9, 2021

      Our New Climate Reality
      5 min read

    • Article

      Year of Fear

      Jan 20, 2024

      Year of Fear
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Last Victorian Sage

      Jan 2, 2020

      The Last Victorian Sage
      6 min read

    • Article

      Chicagoans of the year

      Nov 9, 2019

      Chicagoans of the year
      9 min read

    • Article

      Living Memory

      Jun 23, 2021

      Living Memory
      18 min read

    • Article

      Death Becomes All Of Us

      Feb 21, 2020

      Death Becomes All Of Us
      3 min read

    • Article

      They Were Warriors

      Mar 14, 2020

      They Were Warriors
      31 min read

    • Article

      Hope From The Seed Of Trauma

      Feb 13, 2023

      Hope From The Seed Of Trauma
      10 min read

    • Article

      School’s Out

      Oct 7, 2019

      School’s Out
      8 min read

    • Article

      Countering Online Stereotypes

      May 12, 2022

      One hundred years ago, American journalist Walter Lippmann first popularized the term “stereotype” in his book Public Opinion, describing it as “the distorted picture or image in a person’s mind, not based on personal experience, but derived cultural

      2 min read

    Reviews for Heat Wave

    4/5

    41 ratings6 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      When you think about disasters that caused a whole bunch of deaths in one swoop in the US in the last 25 or 30 years (outside of a war), you probably think about the September 11 attacks, which killed 2,977 in the US. If I were to ask you what the next biggest disaster in terms of deaths, you’d probably also get it right: Hurricane Katrina and its 1,833 deaths. But do you know what caused the third greatest number of deaths in the past 25 years?

      Surprisingly (to me, at least) it was the 1995 Chicago heat wave, which took 733 lives over the course of about a week.

      It’s been hotter than usually in the Pacific Northwest, where I live. We had multiple days in a row above 90, which may not sound bad to those of you used to sweltering summers, but in general folks out here don’t have air conditioning (and if you do have it but you don’t have the money for an electric bill of gargantuan proportions, you might just leave it off). My apartment in the evenings was often still in the mid-upper 80s, and we don’t even get any direct sunlight (thank goodness for north-facing windows). I also work in public health emergency preparedness, so I have an extra special interest in things that cause a whole lot of people to get sick and die at once.

      Author Dr. Klinenberg is originally from Chicago, and earned his PhD in Sociology at UC Berkely in 2000. Heat Wave is his dissertation, exploring not just the health causes of those 700 deaths, but the social causes. His thesis is that the hot days didn’t kill these people alone; the systems society has set up (or not set up) instead failed many of these people in a complicated way that would be dangerous to ignore if we seek to avoid it in the future.
      Much of his work focuses on comparing two neighborhoods that are very similar in some of the basic demographics, and even have the same microclimate, but had VERY different death rates. In one neighborhood (95% black), 40 out of 100,000 residents died in the heat wave; in the neighborhood next door (86% Latino), only 4 out of 100,000 residents died. That is a huge difference, and one that we should try to explain.

      Beyond this, he looks at the role of city government and how they responded (or failed to respond), from the front-line police officers who were tasked with community policing but didn’t check in on the community, through the fire chiefs who ignored warnings from their staff that they should have more ambulances available, to the health commissioner who didn’t really ‘get’ that something was amiss. Dr. Klinenberg also explores the role the media played in not treated the story with the gravity it deserved until late into the heat wave.

      Even if you aren’t interested in public health preparedness, or aren’t into sociological profiles, I think you might find this book to be quite fascinating. I’m impressed with the readability of what is essentially someone’s dissertation, and I think I can learn a lot that will be helpful to me in professional life.

      This book got me back on track for my cannonball read, too, so I’m quite grateful for that. I haven’t finished a book in nearly three weeks. Between going to Canada for five World Cup matches (including the final – woo!), my computer dying, and learning that my back-up system failed, plus the aforementioned ridiculous heat wave we had, I’ve mostly wanted to just sit on my ass and play games on my phone. But no more! I’m back to reading and it feels fantastic.
    • 3/5
      A mixture of sociology, epidemiology, and personal anecdotes of those who survived or died during a heat wave in a modern US city. Very moving, and does an excellent job of convincing the reader that social isolation and a lack of support for vulnerable populations (most particularly, the elderly poor) kill.
    • 4/5
      A great book, in particular the first two chapters, that made me rethink the role of disasters and chronic conditions
    • 5/5
      This book is popular sociology at its best. Klinenberg conducts a "social autopsy" of the 1995 Chicago heat wave, which left over 700 people dead. Asking how such a tragedy could have occurred in a city with modern amenities, he finds that those who suffered from the heat wave were disproportionately the poor and the elderly. Popular press accounts reported on the number dead without acknowledging that those who died did so because of deeply rooted inequalities. By systematically mapping who was affected, Klinenberg is able to touch on larger matters of social justice and equality in the U.S.
    • 4/5
      I've read other Klinenberg titles, and this is his most technical of any I've completed to date, but maintained his style of argument. The 1995 Chicago heat wave was a news maker for its sudden and high death toll, and this analysis was extremely thorough. The argument for how some Chicago neighborhoods experienced more fatalities during the several day heat wave, and how Chicago itself fared so much worse than other nearby cities, is built on an iterative basis by reviewing the experiences and actions of many, many stakeholders. You get to hear from seniors that barely survived, local and federal government staff, journalists that covered the stories, and more. If you aren't a sociologist, you might not be seeking such a complete story but I now feel well-versed in the whole incident and its aftermath.
    • 4/5
      A thorough, comprehensive scholarly glimpse at a social catastrophe that no one considers in the same light as a terrorist attack or natural disaster, but killed over 700 people in the city of Chicago.