- Date
- August 2003
In July 1995, more than 700 Chicago residents died and thousands more became seriously ill during a short heat wave. Most of the victims, who were disproportionately poor and black, died alone, and hundreds were discovered behind locked doors and closed windows, often hours or days after they perished.
The scale of this catastrophe easily dwarfed other environmental disasters in recent years, yet it received far less attention and response both in Chicago and elsewhere across the nation. In his book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, Eric Klinenberg—an OSI Individual Project Fellow and professor of sociology at New York University—explored the social and political conditions that not only made the week so much more treacherous than it should have been, but also contributed to efforts across the spectrum to downplay or even deny the severity of the catastrophe.
Klinenberg discusses several of the book's major themes in "Murder by Public Policy," the August 2003 issue of Ideas for an Open Society. He also analyzes some of the policy changes—many of them misguided or far too limited, in his opinion—implemented in Chicago in response to the disaster.
Heat Wave was a Chicago Tribune Favorite Book Selection for 2002 and has won several awards, including Best Book for 2001-02 from the Urban Affairs Association and Best Book in Sociology and Anthropology from the Association of American Publishers. The paperback version was published in July 2003 by the University of Chicago Press.