About the Book
In July 1995, Chicagoans suffered through a blistering week-long heat wave that buckled streets and downed portions of the city's power grid. It also left over 700 people dead. In this alarming book, Eric Klinenberg tells us how such fatalities could have happened in a modern American city. The picture he paints - of social breakdown, unresponsive government and poorly equipped public services - is one no reader interested in the current state of American urbanism can afford to ignore.
About the Author :
Eric Klinenberg is professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York 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.
Review :
"Klinenberg creates a compelling sociological history that is in critical and productive conversation with current cultural analyses of catastrophe and contemporary urban sociologies of race, class, and marginality."--John L. Jackson "American Journal of Sociology"
"Heat Wave is an exquisitely written, impeccably researched work, and one could hardly imagine how anyone could do more in a single effort to reveal the deadly social fractures of the cities we live in. In this brilliant book, Klinenberg makes visible the ongoing disaster of poverty and isolation that is silently unraveling in some of the most affluent cities in North America."
--Joe Hermer "Canadian Journal of Urban Research"
"Heat Wave is not so much a book about weather, as it is about the calamitous consequences of forgetting our fellow citizens. . . . A provocative, fascinating book, one that applies to much more than weather disasters."
--Neil Steinberg "Chicago Sun-Times"
"A damning indictment of the 'malign neglect' with which the old, frail and poor and isolated are treated in Chicago."
--John Adams "Times Higher Education"
"A riveting account . . . that delves into the processes leading to social isolation, the social and built ecology of urban neighborhoods, and the failure of city, state, and federal governments to prevent or respond to a public health crisis. . . . Heat Wave is well worth a read regardless of one's interest in heat waves or public health. . . . It is well-suited for required reading in public health and social science courses and for fascinating armchair reading."--Karen E. Smoyer Tomic "JAMA"
"A trenchant, multilayered and well-written social autopsy of disaster. . . . God is in the details, though, and Klinenberg painstakingly lays out for us both the structural and more proximate policies that led to the disastrous Chicago mortality figures of July 1995."
--Micaela di Leonardo "Nation"
"By the end of Heat Wave, Klinenberg has traced the lines of culpability in dozens of directions, drawing a dense and subtle portrait of exactly what happened during that week in July."
--Malcolm Gladwell "New Yorker"
"In a typical year more Americans die in heat waves than in all other natural calamities combined. Yet they hardly generate the kind of buzz that hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, or wildfires do. In the compelling, sobering, and exhaustively researched Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg suggests a plausible reason."
--Diego Ribadeneira "Boston Globe"
"It is riveting. It is intellectually exciting. If it is not pathbreaking for the study of political communication, it is nonetheless destined to be a recurrent point of reference and an excellent choice for classroom use. . . . This is a stunningly good book, a rare work with broad vision, theoretical savvy, and prodigious leg work in government bureaus, city news rooms, and tough neighborhoods. . . . Klinenberg touched every base, took no shortcuts, and has produced a sociological masterpiece."
--Michael Schudson "Political Communication"
"Once in a while it is said, 'Someone will have to write a book about this.' Heat Wave . . . is that book on urban catastrophes. Klinenberg has meticulously documented a great tragedy in recent Chicago History. He has written it in a manner which allows scholars, activists, community planners and policy-makers to draw lessons, so that it may never happen again."
--Douglas C. Gills "Urban Studies"
"Relying on ethnographic fieldwork, spatial and statistical analysis, in-depth interviewing, and archival research, Klinenberg's book is a very accomplished sociological case study, imaginatively conceived, tenaciously researched, and . . . strikingly innovative. The work illuminates the contemporary problems of aging, popery, and community neglect with great skill and sensitivity. In the process, Heat Wave offers an exemplary demonstration of how an intensive, multilayered analytical focus on an extreme case or event can yield fresh insight into the social structures, ecologies, and policies that produce everyday inequity and hardship."
--William Sites "Social Service Review"
"Remarkable . . . Klinenberg's immediate aim is to explain the heat wave's unprecedented death toll, and he does so with chilling precision. But his ultimate achievement is far more significant. In exploring what made Chicago so vulnerable to disaster in 1995, Klinenberg provides a riveting account of the changes that reshaped urban America during the 1990s and, indeed, throughout the postwar era."
--Jim McNeill "American Prospect"
"Revealing and provocative."
--Tom Vanderbilt "London Review of Books"
"The book should be required reading for all public officials."
-- "Choice"
"This masterful study of the intersection of the political and the ecological reveals just how important it is that sociologists look not just a t trends or patterns over time, but at specific events. . . . . . . . Heat Wave is a great book because it focuses its attention on a tear in the social fabric in order to explore more deeply the normal-time weave, and to raise these critical questions about what might be the institutional forms and the cultural contents of a society that would rescue its citizens who live 'normally' in extremis."--Robin Wagner-Pacifici "Social Forces"
"Trenchant and persuasive. . . . What makes Heat Wave such an essential book at this moment in American politics is that, using the 1995 heat wave as his paradigm, Klinenberg has written a forceful account of what it means to be poor, old, sick and alone in the era of American entrepreneurial government. . . . It's hard to put down Heat Wave without believing you've just read a tale of slow murder by public policy."
--Charles Taylor "Salon.com"
Best Book in Sociology and Anthropology
-- "Association of American Publishers' Professional/Scholarly Division"
Mirra Komarovsky Book Award
-- "Eastern Sociological Society"
