Interesting, but as others have pointed out, not very accessible to the lay reader as it is essentially a sociology dissertation. Helped tremedously by the copious photos of this little-known disaster in Chicago that killed over 700 people in a very short period of time.

This was an assigned textbook for my MPH Ethics in Public Health class. It is a lot of factual information, but I found it to be a very interesting case study of the 1995 heat wave disaster that killed over 700 people. It is definitely a worthwhile read if you are interested at all in taking a closer look at social structures within our population or disaster management.

Important to understand why social disasters happened in the past and how future tragedies can be prevented, particularly in climate crises and with policy implementation. Noted that the emergency heat plans did not get activated because upper management never saw the heat wave as an important crisis and did not check on frontline communities such as the elderly or isolated.

A damning indictment of all the dramatis personae who share the blame for what went wrong during the Chicago heat wave of 1995, resulting in a death toll exceeding 800. This well-presented scholarly analysis examines the factors affecting the city's social structure that contributed to the high mortality rate & the role that the municipal government, public aid agencies, utilities, & media played in this urban tragedy. The worrisome lesson asserted in the book's concluding chapter: a disaster of this magnitude could happen again.

great social science reasearch and an inspiration to me. exploring relationships between social cohesion, urban ecology, and public health, all crystallized through the disaster of the chicago heat wave. klinenberg is awesome.

Of course, I have an obligatory heat wave story- I was 9 and spent the worst of it in my dad's North Side apartment without power or AC. We took turns taking cold baths. I was too hot to even read. That's how you know it's bad.

Despite the fact that I was there, I never realized what a public health disaster this heat wave (and other previous and subsequent ones) was for Chicago until this book was assigned to me in grad school. A quick survey of Chicagoan friends and family found that not a single one knew of the huge death toll, although they certainly remembered the heat wave. Given the global trends toward creation of larger cities and overall warming climate for many temperate North American cities, this is a very relevant warning.

Read for class. It was neat and good. I got a lot more out of it because it was a sociology class.

Required reading for the Disaster Science Fellowship. Better than I thought. Great writing and takes us close to the unimaginable.

I really want to say this book is an urbanist must-read, with its comprehensive look at how multiple urban systems can fail and kill hundreds without anyone in particular being to blame. It's absolutely an important disaster worth reading about, especially considering how little it's represented in US history of natural disasters and their not so natural consequences. It says a lot about segregation and poverty in Chicago. Unfortunately, it's a book where the academic language and structure are such a drag to get through, obscuring information rather than clarifying it. I skipped over a lot of paragraphs full of repeated arguments and methodology.

Which is exactly the point this book is trying to make, in a way - the popular media doesn't touch this sort of race and class analysis with a ten foot pole, so of course there's only a market for a seriously academic book on the subject.

Recommended if you're in the mood to do some work to get to the meat of the story; it brought me right back to grad school but in a "late night exhausted reading session" way more than a "stimulating class discussion" way.

Horribly depressing, but a great look at the Chicago heat wave from a native's point of view. Great graphs too!!!! Great for the sociology dork in all of us!
Seriously though, I got alot out of this book and it makes you ponder who suffers in natural disasters and what sections of society manage to prevail unscarred.

I lived in Chicago when this heat wave hit so was very interested in this book. I listened to it on audible, so not sure I got the most out of it. Need to listen to it again to give it a true review.

Well researched and well written. Very depressing.