This book makes me want to revise my ratings. Considering other books I’ve rated five stars, this is actually a six. Originally a doctoral dissertation in urban sociology, read by me as mandatory reading in a qualitative methods class, it captivates me with its comprehensive analysis as well as rich storytelling, where the author’s engagement shines through - and draws the reader into it - in a way not too common in academic writing.

Prologue - Chp2 for HI568

As a kid, I lived through the Chicago heatwave that killed over 700 people in July 1995 and honestly have no recollection of it, and apparently I'm not the only one. I have vivid memories of the blizzard of January 1999 in Chicago, but my only childhood recollections of summer weather events in Chicago are listening to former Mayor Daley exhorting Chicagoans to check up on elderly family and neighbors to make sure they were OK, and cooling down by running around in the water spray feature in my local Chicago park .

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg's book Heat Wave is an interesting exploration of why this severe heatwave has been glossed over by so many. He spent several years researching the events of the heat wave, the victims, the neighborhoods that had the highest fatality rates compared to nearby neighborhoods with lower fatality rates (and social factors contributing to this, both positive and negative), the choppy, inconsistent news coverage of the incident as it unfolded, the complicated reasons why first responders took so long to respond to calls, the political underpinnings of the city's response to the heat wave, and, in the 2015 edition which I listened to, a retrospective analysis on how climate change may have precipitated the event. While some areas where more conjecture than others, I appreciated this interdisciplinary look.

This is definitely a Chicago tragedy that's fallen through the cracks, similar to the sinking of the Eastland which killed over 800 people in 1915, which as a native Chicagoan I'd never heard of until a few years ago.

My statistics:
Book 188 for 2024
Book 1791 cumulatively

A good reminder about looking at sociological, societal, political, economic... reasons for catastrophes as well as medical and "individual responsibility".

Ok, so I did not read the whole thing, but academic books are not meant to be read through, much the less this one, which moves so slowly and can be very dull at times. So, like everyone, I skimmed a lot of it. Yet, there is a lot of fascinating stuff in here, specially in the chapter on the neighboring areas with different mortality profiles.

I remember this heat wave, suffering, with a friend. We were riding bikes, and I said something about the heat wave killing people, implying we could be next. My friend said, those people were trapped inside. We were safe. This book is about the people trapped inside. Social Autopsy is an accurate description of what happened-- why so many people died, which neighborhoods had the highest mortality, how the city responded to the crisis and minimized the deaths.

#BookToReadBeforeSummer
A sociological perspective on natural disasters. The author describes heat waves as "silent and invisible kills of silenced and invisible people". Different from other disasters like flooding, landslide, earthquake, etc., heat wave won't generate eye-catching images on news, but disproportionally affect the marginalized, isolated population in the society.

This book is a good companion to County. The missed opportunities, the blatant lies from City Hall and other main actors, the high death toll, it was too much at times and I wanted to throw the book and scream.

It is fascinating to read this 20 years after the Chicago heat wave of July 1995 that killed nearly 800 people. I am a social worker now, and I am aware of many changes that have happened in the "aging network" of people who work with marginalized older adults in the city (including people who are tasked with checking on known isolated persons in extreme heat or extreme cold).

However, I don't doubt that far too many old, isolated citizens would still perish if the same extreme weather event happened now.

Five stars for content. Three for readability. I trudged through but even though I was sincerely interested in the subject matter, it was a chore.

Interesting findings on how the physical features of neighborhoods impacts residents ability to foster community, as well as some intriguing questions to ponder regarding the role of the media and local government in response to public health crises.

Fascinating, painless social science. I moved to Chicago during the first week of the July 1995 'heat wave' which this book analyses. It was amazing to learn, several years afterward, how much my experience differed from those unseen/unheard

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. . .
(from the publisher's description)

This was a hard book to read because of all the stupid, unnecessary mistakes that were made. The central question for me was why so many people died at home alone and this book answered it. I hope nothing like this ever happens again, but with all of the climate changes that are going on, it is bound to!

TL;DR Heat Wave is an important book that should be read by everyone because it fosters a deeper and broader understanding how disasters happen.

There are no "natural" disasters. There are natural hazards. All "disasters" are man made (in spite of what the dictionary will tell you). Heat Wave reads like a true-crime murder mystery and successfully answers the question: why were some people at greater risk than others? I have so many good things to say about this book that it's difficult to write a coherent review. Put simply, although this book is about a particular tragedy in Chicago's history, the lessons gleaned can prepare us better for every disaster. Indeed, this was the author's purpose in a writing an "autopsy."

My favorite lesson: community matters.