Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago

Klinenberg, Eric

ISBN 10 : 0226443221 ISBN 13 : 9780226443225

Editeur : University of Chicago Press, 2002

Synopsis

Heat Wave In July 1965 Chicago suffered a blistering week long heatwave that buckled streets and left over 700 people dead. Klinenberg discusses how such fatalities could have happened in a modern American city. Full description

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

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. 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.

Starting with the question of why so many people died at home alone, Klinenberg investigates why some neighborhoods experienced greater mortality than others, how the city government responded to the crisis, and how journalists, scientists, and public officials reported on and explained these events.

Biographie de l'auteur :

Eric Klinenberg is an assistant professor of sociology at New York University and has also taught at Northwestern University. The recipient of an Individual Projects Fellowship from the Open Society Institute in 2000, he is the coeditor of The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness and a regular contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press
• Date d'édition: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0226443221
• ISBN 13: 9780226443225
• Reliure: Livre broché
• Nombre de pages: 328