Heat wave : a social autopsy of disaster in Chicago

Resource Information

The work Heat wave : a social autopsy of disaster in Chicago represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Heat wave : a social autopsy of disaster in Chicago

Title remainder

a social autopsy of disaster in Chicago

Statement of responsibility

Eric Klinenberg

Creator

• Klinenberg, Eric

Subject

• Chicago
• Chicago (Ill.) -- Social conditions
• Disasters
• Disasters -- Social aspects -- Illinois | Chicago
• Heat Stress Disorders -- mortality
• Heat waves (Meteorology) -- Illinois | Chicago
• Hot Temperature -- adverse effects
• Aged
• Older disaster victims
• Older people -- Illinois | Chicago -- Social conditions
• Older people -- Services for
• Older people -- Services for -- Illinois | Chicago
• Socioeconomic Factors
• Urban Population
• Illinois

Language

eng

Summary

• "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."--Jacket

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

363.34/921

Illustrations

• illustrations
• maps

Index

index present

LC call number

HV1471.C38

LC item number

K585 2002

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography