Overview

On Thursday, July 13, 1995, Chicagoans awoke to a blistering day in which the temperature would reach 106 degrees. The heat index, which measures how the temperature actually feels on the body, would hit 126 degrees by the time the day was over. When the heat wave broke a week later, city streets had buckled; the records for electrical use were shattered; and power grids had failed, leaving residents without electricity for up to two days. And by July 20, over seven hundred people had perished--more than twice the number that died in the Chicago Fire of 1871--in the great Chicago heat wave, one of the deadliest in American history. Heat waves in the United States kill more people during a typical year than all other natural disasters combined. Until now, no one could explain either the overwhelming number or the heartbreaking manner of the deaths resulting from the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Meteorologists and medical scientists have been unable to account for the scale of the trauma, and political officials have puzzled over the sources of the city's vulnerability. In Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg takes us inside the anatomy of the metropolis to conduct what he calls a social autopsy, examining the social, political, and institutional organs of the city that made this urban disaster so much worse than it ought to have been.

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9798200720361

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Eric Klinenberg is professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. The recipient of an Individual Projects Fellowship from the Open Society Institute in 2000, he is coeditor of The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness and a regular contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique. Michael Butler Murray is an audiobook narrator as well as an actor and producer known for Jersey Boys, Frontera, The Day of the Grackle, and iCarly: iGo to Japan.

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