Waubonsee Community College

Heat wave, a social autopsy of disaster in Chicago, Eric Klinenberg

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 281-295) and index

mapsillustrations

index present

non fiction

Heat wave

bibliography

47971411

Eric Klinenberg

"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. Meteorologists had been warning residents about a two-day heat wave, but these temperatures did not end that soon. 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

a social autopsy of disaster in Chicago

And by July 20, over seven hundred people had perished - more than twice the number that died in the Chicago Fire of 1871, twenty times the number of those struck by Hurricane Andrew in 1992 - 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."--Jacket

Acknowledgments -- Prologue : Urban inferno -- Introduction : City of extremes -- Dying alone : the social production of isolation -- Race, place, and vulnerability : urban neighborhoods and the ecology of support -- State of disaster : city services in the empowerment era -- Governing by public relations -- Spectacular city : news organizations and the representation of catastrophe -- Emerging dangers in the urban environment -- Together in the end