This is not the book I thought it was, or was going to be. If you're looking for fascinating anecdotes about neighborhoods and people trying to survive a natural disaster, this is not your book. This is an endlessly dry statistical analysis of how a Mayor failed to act in a major, deadly heat wave, how he tried to downplay everything because of politics, how everyone tried to pass the buck, how concentrations of very poor urban elderly in single room occupancy hotels with no airconditioning and no way to get to cooling centers died by the hundreds, and how most of these people were urban black poor. So many of them were so isolated, so afraid to leave their apartments due to crime, that in the end, more than forty bodies were never claimed by a relative, and had to be buried in a mass grave.

While every topic discussed is relevant, it is as dry as a desert, discussing sociology issues and barely touching on actual people and their stories. I realize Chicago is a hotbed of sociology issues, including redlining realestate and tight segregation, but surely there had to be interesting stories to tell somewhere in there.

Yeah, I got through it to the end, but slogging is a good word to describe the book. Only for the true sociologist.

Great, but tragic, social autopsy of the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Unfortunately, the social isolation, neoliberalist policies, and growing inequality that Klinenberg documents in the 90s remains true 20 years later.

The story of the deadly 1995 Chicago heat wave is fascinating enough, but don't expect Eric Klinenberg's book to be a popularly-accessible page-turner. Klinenberg's book was written as a dissertation in sociology, so its methodology and supporting evidence are sound, but it seems to have been revised only minimally (if at all) for a lay audience.

The upshot of Klinenberg's analysis of what led to so many deaths in Chicago in July, 1995 is that living alone leads to dying alone, as getting out of sweltering tenement apartments and single-occupancy rooms--the kind of accommodations peopled by the urban poor and elderly--is essential for survival in a heat wave. In order to get out of their rooms and apartments, however, both the poor and elderly need to have welcoming (and cool) places to go, they need to feel safe walking their neighborhood streets and sidewalks, and they need to feel connected with (or at least trusting of) their neighbors and surrounding communities.

Klinenberg's book is illustrated with indelible images of the disaster, including photos of emergency workers removing victims in body bags from locked, air-tight apartments: visual proof that its not the heat nor the humidity that kills in a heat wave; it's the social isolation.

Interesting. Apparently methodologically controversial, at least where a couple people are concerned, though I have yet to read the articles. The examinations of death rates by age, race, socioeconomic status, and geographical location are extremely compelling, but when Eric gets political he gets a little ranty and I understand the POV of the people who claim he's working off certain biases. Still, good read. Recommended.

Klinenberg meticulously documents the travesty that was the Chicago heat wave of 1995. The heat wave exposed the significant weaknesses of the service delivery methods of the Chicago municipal government. Heat Wave exposes the systematic breakdown of local government at multiple levels in Chicago. Mid-level bureaucrats failed to communicate across departments. The mayor and his administration refused to even acknowledge the rising death toll. Indeed, the city failed to even implement its own emergency management plan for the disaster.

Even worse, both the fire and police commissioner claimed that their departments were not overwhelmed, despite substantial evidence to the contrary. Instead, they deflected blame onto the victims themselves; essentially saying they were not "smart consumers" of the city's services. "We're talking about people who die because they neglect themselves," the police superintendent told the press (p.172). These actions were part of a concerted effort to govern and manage media coverage through public relations tactics.

Mayor Daley was similarly guilty of managing the city through public relations denial techniques. Daley questioned the medical examiner's death totals, wondering publicly if the numbers were "really real". Further, the mayor's office attempted to silence public employees, denying responsibility and renaming the event from a man-made social disaster to a meteorological one. Finally, the mayor created a commission that exonerated his administration of any wrongdoing or negligence. Instead, they claimed that "government alone cannot do it all".

Klinenberg's assertion is two-fold. First, he argues that the city did not take the threat of the heat wave seriously, failed to implement their own plan, and massively bungled the aftermath. Second, and more importantly, neoliberalism, through privatization, contracting out of services, and government/business divestment of poor neighborhoods, made the conditions possible for the disaster to happen in the first place.

On the first point, the seven hundred plus death toll is testament to the failure. This likely underestimates the number of deaths due to the fact that only those that died in the city were counted rather than those that might have been transported to a suburban hospital. The deaths were preventable. The city government and media failed to properly warn residents, instead using cutesy, even condescending language about the vulnerable.

The city (and federal government) also failed on a number of other measures. There was not a concerted effort in place to reach out to elderly residents. A lack of energy assistance, the result of federal budget cuts, meant that fixed-income residents were unable to afford air-conditioning on a regular basis. Transportation to cooling centers was insufficient and unreliable. Emergency vehicles failed to respond in a timely manner; some victims had to wait over 30 minutes for an ambulance. Those that did respond often found that hospitals were refusing patients. Twenty-three of forty-five local hospitals in Chicago were on "bypass status".

Klinenberg portrays neoliberalism as the more nefarious of the two causes. High crime areas devoid of investment from any level of government -- essentially abandoned sections of the city -- housed an elderly population that was fearful to go outside. These neighborhoods were described as "bombed out" and "warzones" by their own residents. On top of the lack of jobs, businesses, and services, the ecology of the environment was severely degraded, making it difficult for frail residents to physically travel around.

During the 1999 heat wave, which was longer-lasting than 1995, Chicago mobilized a "Heat Command Center" to check on seniors and provide assistance over the phone. The city added ambulances, contracted with local cab companies to transport city residents to cooling centers, and paid outreach workers to go door to door in neighborhoods with high concentrations of seniors. While the conservative Chicago Tribune editorial board decried these actions as "wasteful," only one hundred and ten people died in all of Cook County versus that seven hundred thirty-nine in 1995. It's clear from the 1999 heat wave that these best practices minimized death in the city -- to a still unacceptable, but substantially improved level -- even without addressing the underlying social impacts of failed neoliberal policies.

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.

I think this was Klineberg's dissertation from Berkeley, but don't let the academic aspect turn you off from this one. It's a case study of the heat wave epidemic that hit Chicago in 1995, ultimately killing over 700 people. Klineberg explores the reasons why, contrasting this heat wave against another in the city decades earlier that killed almost no one. He ends up talking a lot about how social conditions and social relationships have changed (allowing so many people to die home alone during the heat wave), in addition to examining how city officials reacted to the crisis. Engaging, and a good read overall.

A sobering and frightening analysis of the Chicago heat wave that killed over 730 citizens in 1995. Not an easy read but very understandable even if you do not have a sociology background. The author goes into the many things that went wrong 28 years ago (as I write this) and I'm afraid a lot of the problems he goes into are still alive and kicking. As our planet continues to warm, deadly heat waves will happen more and more frequently so please don't read this book and think, "Well, that wouldn't happen now"...it would and it does.

One thing that the author did not touch on is the effect of heat waves on the homeless; perhaps there was no significant homeless population in Chicago in 1995.

An excellent book that no one should turn a blind eye to. Highly recommended.

I am always down for discussion about senior isolation, mental health, the US culture of shunning those deemed invaluable, etc. But this is such shitty, shitty writing. Omg. Terrible.

We read this book so we could understand the dysfunction that is the city of Chicago so that we could better understand the dysfunction of its school system. Found it very "1984" that after hundreds had died in this heat wave many started to doubt that it ever happen. Word was put out that the death toll was exaggerated. It's as if from one day to the next they forgot the refrigerated trucks outside the Cook County Medical Examiners office were really there to take the overflow of bodies. And who comprised the dead? The black poor and no they were not all old but they were all unempowered and with out A/C.

As his title indicates, Klinenberg employs more than the typical tools of sociology—ethnographic fieldwork, participation observation, interviews, archival research, mapping, and statistical analysis (13)—to retroactively explore the 1995 heat wave that took more than 700 lives from Chicago's most vulnerable. Just as a medical autopsy is performed in order to determine the physiological cause of death, Klinenberg argues that a social autopsy of the heat wave similarly views the city of Chicago as a system of municipal organs in order to identify the social conditions responsible for these collective deaths (11). Such an analysis uncovers the underlying structural inputs of this tragedy, which have largely been obscured by government officials and the media, as official reports and news coverage alike attributed the heat wave death toll to solely a meteorological event (16).

I had to read this when I learned it was about a major disaster that took place less than 10 years ago, that I somehow never heard about -- and me only 4 hours away by car! While the subject is very interesting, the author tries much too hard to sound scholarly. The five-dollar words and windy sentences make for a very dry read. He also backtracks and repeats himself so much that the point he's trying to make finally gets lost. I have to say, though, the facts and figures he presents are pretty astounding. I had no idea how many people this kills every year, and I definitely had no idea how current-day America kills off its elderly by stranding them in lousy neighborhoods with nobody to look in on them, where they're so scared by the news stories that they barricade themselves into their tiny, airless apartments and don't dare open their windows even when it gets above a hundred degrees. We really are the stupidest people on earth.