Purchase
A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago
University Of Chicago Press
July 2006
328 pages
ISBN: 0226443221
EAN: 9780226443225
Trade Size
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction
On Thursday, 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-more than twice the number that
died in the Chicago Fire of 1871, twenty times the number of
those struck by Hurricane Andrew in 1992--in the great
Chicago heat wave, one of the deadliest in American history. Heat waves in the United States kill more people during a
typical year than all other natural disasters combined.
Until now, no one could explain either the overwhelming
number or the heartbreaking manner of the deaths resulting
from the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Meteorologists and medical
scientists have been unable to account for the scale of the
trauma, and political officials have puzzled over the
sources of the city's vulnerability. In Heat Wave, Eric
Klinenberg takes us inside the anatomy of the metropolis to
conduct what he calls a "social autopsy," examining the
social, political, and institutional organs of the city that
made this urban disaster so much worse than it ought to have
been. Starting with the question of why so many people died at
home alone, Klinenberg investigates why some neighborhoods
experienced greater mortality than others, how the city
government responded to the crisis, and how journalists,
scientists, and public officials reported on and explained
these events. Through a combination of years of fieldwork,
extensive interviews, and archival research, Klinenberg
uncovers how a number of surprising and unsettling forms of
social breakdown-including the literal and social isolation
of seniors, the institutional abandonment of poor
neighborhoods, and the retrenchment of public assistance
programs-contributed to the high fatality rates. The human
catastrophe, he argues, cannot simply be blamed on the
failures of any particular individuals or organizations. For
when hundreds of people die behind locked doors and sealed
windows, out of contact with friends, family, community
groups, and public agencies, everyone is implicated in their
demise. As Klinenberg demonstrates in this incisive and gripping
account of the contemporary urban condition, the widening
cracks in the social foundations of American cities that the
1995 Chicago heat wave made visible have by no means
subsided as the temperatures returned to normal. The forces
that affected Chicago so disastrously remain in play in
America's cities, and we ignore them at our peril.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy