{"product_id":"heat-wave-a-social-autopsy-of-disaster-in-chicago-9780226443225","title":"Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago","description":"\u003cp\u003eOn 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 1992in 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 citys 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 breakdownincluding the literal and social isolation of seniors  the institutional abandonment of poor neighborhoods  and the retrenchment of public assistance programscontributed 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 Americas cities  and we ignore them at our peril.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45646703165493,"sku":"ByrdShop_0226443221","price":36.29,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780226443225.jpg?v=1781677473","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/heat-wave-a-social-autopsy-of-disaster-in-chicago-9780226443225","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}