Am important book for public policy

had to read this book for my sociology class. i won’t lie to you guys, i skimmed through some portions of this book but i did enjoy it!

the commentary on the government, neighborhoods, & community is really strong and it inspires me to take some action in my own life to prevent those i know (and those i do not know now, but will later in life) from being isolated from being isolated in society. klinenberg puts into perspective that while, yes, we do have an obligation to check up on those close to us and make sure they’re doing well, but it’s also the responsibility of the government to make sure elderly people are not being isolated in the first place.

even with that, their lack of action in the first few days of the heat wave is astonishing in all ways but positive. chapter 3 talks about chicago’s lack of action and how it fucked up hundreds of residents because they didn’t use their emergency plan. really puts into perspective the government’s whole mindset of "saving money regardless of the expense to people’s lives" (134). even ignoring that (which is a huge thing to ignore but moving on), seeing how they fucked over metro seniors, an organization that dedicates their whole time to helping and caring for elderly people, just shows how much the government does not care for certain demographics of the public because they deem them "not important enough.”

all in all, this book is a fantastic read. not something i would normally read as a book on the side but reading this had definitely changed my mind and i’m bound to start reading similar books in the future. klinenberg’s in-depth analysis and research on the heat wave, tracking down those who were effected by the heat wave or related in any aspect, spoke to me and his dedication to his work.

For a week in July, Chicagoans endured temps of 100 degrees or more. For many, it was a death sentence; over 500 people died as a result of the blistering heat wave. This is a sociological examination of the factors that caused so many people to die. Unfortunately, it reads like a sociology textbook and despite the interesting subject, it is very dry and boring. I made it to page 50.

Though this book can be a smidge dry (it's a history text) at times, the concept of a social autopsy and what it reveals of people in this particular disaster is FASCINATING. TL;DR - if you don't have a community of people, you're in trouble. Highly recommend this book; if it's too much for you, listen to this podcast: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cauti...

A super interesting topic and well-researched, but it probably could have been half the length and still delivered the same key arguments.

Though not a disaster book per se, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago fits right alongside many of the best scenario/incident-specific disaster books out there. This book doesn't have the narrative flair of, say, Five Days at Memorial, but it is equally poignant and very telling as to what makes an extreme weather event a "disaster."

The ingredients for disaster are all around us, and they're woven into the fabric of our communities. The age and maintenance status of infrastructure systems is known. Ditto the differences in experience of urban and rural communities. And while "social vulnerability" is another known ingredient, Klinenberg helps us to realize that there's more to it than just dropping people into social vulnerability buckets: age, poverty status, transportation access, race, etc.

How do social vulnerability variables interact and overlap?

Who are these people, and what type of support do they really need?

What can a public sector entity do?

As you read Heat Wave, you can't help but think about the evolution of the modern community. The patterns of interaction, in/out migration, spatial need, etc., that built our cities aren't the patterns that prevail today. To be connected means something in today's world that was unfathomable when the primary way to be connected was by being in touch with (and often close to) family or being outside in your neighborhood. When you think of that, what makes a neighborhood? The physical has long given way to the notional. And with that, a need to re-envision physical spaces emerges.

Growing up and living in a rural area (albeit one with a robust enough transportation infrastructure to be within striking distance of several cities), I've always been fascinated by the pockets of community that exist in cities. My hometown wasn't big enough to have physical areas settled by immigrants from common areas of the world. It's in those pockets where place and personal identity are intertwined, and though in another space I could list the many things that are great about small communities, that place attachment is just different in cities. Heat Wave dissects that notion and prods us to look at the preparedness, response, and resilience implications.

Finally, what review written in 2023 would be complete without a nod to the themes from the book that we say play out during the COVID-19 pandemic? Widespread denial, fact bending, framing, definitional smoke and mirrors, scapegoating, deflecting...should we be comforted or abhorred that none of that stuff was new and unique to the pandemic?

Klinenberg is most successful at helping his readers question "What is a disaster?" Considering the social fabric of a community is an important step at understanding how a disaster might unfold in one's community.

Heat waves are a distinctive type of environmental disaster. Unlike blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes, they are more or less invisible save for the many visible ways humans respond to them. And while heat waves in urban environments are frequently deadly, their victims are similarly invisible—typically poor, elderly, and socially isolated people of color who live alone on the margins of society. In Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg analyzes one especially deadly heat wave in the summer of 1995 in Chicago. Estimates vary, but credible accounts put the death toll at more than seven hundred people, which made the 1995 Chicago heat wave the deadliest heat disaster in the United States at that time. On any estimate, many more people died in the 1995 heat wave than in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, an event which, unlike the heat wave, is forever inscribed in the collective memory of the city. By contrast, Chicagoans have all but forgotten the 1995 heat wave and those invisible people whom it killed.

In Heat Wave, Klinenberg performs what he calls a “social autopsy” of the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Just as a medical autopsy opens the human body to determine the proximate causes of mortality, a social autopsy examines the social “body” of the city to identify the conditions that contributed, in this case, to heat-related deaths. By way of the social autopsy, Klinenberg aims to dispel the erroneous notion that the heat wave was, as it were, an “act of God”—an unforeseeable weather event with unfortunate consequences that could not have been avoided. More precisely, he strives to show how social conditions that “we have collectively created” are what “made it possible for so many Chicago residents to die in the summer of 1995” and, moreover, that these same conditions “make these deaths so easy to overlook and forget” (11). Yet the social autopsy also serves a different, albeit related function: on the Maussian and Durkheimian principle that extreme events allow us “to better perceive the facts than in those places where . . . they still remain small-scale and involuted,” Klinenberg’s analysis of the heat way discloses otherwise difficult-to-perceive social conditions that nevertheless structure life in the city each and every day (23). These conditions, like the heat wave, are in some sense invisible; the social autopsy unveils them and subjects them to close analysis and critical inquiry.

Klinenberg takes a kind of double-barrelled approach to his social autopsy. On the one hand, he focuses on systems, structures, and institutions to account for a wide variety of social, cultural, economic, and urban environmental factors that compounded the effects of the heat wave. On the other hand, he conducts hundreds of interviews with victims’ friends and families, elderly citizens who survived the heat wave, journalists, city officials, and other observers to understand the heat wave at the “face-to-face” level. Both aspects of this approach inform and complement one another: Klinenberg interviews elderly North Lawndale residents, for example, to understand their lived experience of under-resourced, abandoned communities victimized by historical injustices and violent crime. Their testimony, in turn, informs his analysis of social isolation—particularly in terms of how a “culture of fear” keeps elderly residents indoors, even to the point of death amidst a heat wave. The double-barrelled approach also means that Heat Wave never strays too far from the deeply visceral and “felt” consequences of the 1995 heat wave, even if Klinenberg rejects the “personal responsibility” thesis for why some residents died while others survived. He offers readers several windows onto the lives of both victims and survivors: early in the first chapter, we read of a conference room in the Office of the Cook County Public Administrator filled with boxes of victims’ property, never to be claimed by their friends or relatives. In the same chapter, we meet Pauline Jankowitz, an older woman who covered herself with cold washcloths to survive the heat wave.

Klinenberg complements his analysis of the social conditions that compounded the effects of the heat wave with an equally incisive analysis of “the symbolic construction of the heat wave as a public event and experience” (23). He claims that journalistic, scientific, and political institutions wielded their symbolic power to impose a normative set of interpretive standards to frame the heat wave as, for example, a “natural disaster,” and that this framework mediated citizens’ experience and interpretation of the event. This analysis is a testament to what one could call the “symbolic construction of reality,” to adopt a phrase from the philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Politicians and journalists’ symbolic construction of the heat wave offered various partial interpretations of the event that obfuscated the systemic factors that exacerbated its consequences. The Daley administration used its symbolic power to defend its response to the crisis, deny moral responsibility for its harmful effects, and blame the heat wave’s victims for their own deaths. Journalists, for their part, reported on the heat wave in conformance with institutional and professional norms that sensationalized the crisis and reinforced city officials’ distorted narrative. Then, once consumers’ appetite for the disaster abated, the “major story” of the heat wave fell out of the collective consciousness. In time, it was almost entirely forgotten.

Twenty-three years after its initial publication, Heat Wave is more relevant than ever. In our current era of climate crisis, heat waves are less rare and more potent than in 2000. Nevertheless, the social, cultural, economic, and urban environmental factors to which Klinenberg calls attention in Heat Wave persist and threaten to kill many more people in cities across the world, especially those that have not yet adapted to our current climate reality. Heat waves are, and will most likely continue to be, the United States’ “most lethal form of extreme weather. They remain silent and invisible killers of silent and invisible people” (xxi). To dismiss, trivialize, or sensationalize heat waves is a moral failure and an injustice to the poor, elderly, and socially isolated people of color most likely to suffer and die from their effects—and whose lives we can, in many instances, collectively protect.

Deceptively horrifying and deeply saddening

It is courageous of the author to cover so many materials and perspectives in one book. The book has raised up many interesting points that are worthy of more theoretical attention.

I read this on recommendation. It's an exhaustive and slightly exhausting mixed-bag. Reading during the COVID19 lockdown I was hoping for some points to areas that might help with the issue of how do you connect to isolated people in the inner cities who might be at risk during crises, like our current one. We find out some unsurprising things: poor people, mainly black, fare the worst and the crisis rips along a seam sewn into the fabric of society by decades of neglect and vagaries of long economic cycles, what we would expect though are rarely told. So, reading this over 200 pages wouldn't be enough. We are are given a view from some of the protagonists, no politicians, the press and then synthesis and conclusions. Reading about the construction of a story by the the news teams in Chicago was interesting and the author suggests that many lessons were not learned.

As a British reader some of the issues and cultural and political framing were quite alien. The European social safety nets and the American cult of self-reliance, sinking or swimming, hasn't been completed grafted onto the resistant British stock, accommodated as it has become to the welfare state for 70 years. There are clear political lessons: the culture of cash-starved services prioritising a balanced budget will cause deaths when a crisis hits (something we are seeing played out with our health service at the moment); citizens should not be viewed primarily as consumers of services, unless you wish to exclude or neglect the most vulnerable groups and individuals who cannot fulfill this new social requirement. Finally, the lesson I took away: concentrate on managing the story, this is the most important thing, as most people will forget about deaths if they weren't people like you.

One of the few books on the disaster. Much more “social sciences” than a review in depth of the disaster itself. Was hoping for more substance on the way the disaster played out rather than the ‘social justice’ of the disaster.

A thorough, comprehensive scholarly glimpse at a social catastrophe that no one considers in the same light as a terrorist attack or natural disaster, but killed over 700 people in the city of Chicago.