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Cargando... Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Illinois)por Eric Klinenberg
   Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.   )1   jonerthon | Oct 4, 2021 |  ) DrFuriosa | Dec 4, 2020 | Surprisingly (to me, at least) it was the 1995 Chicago heat wave, which took 733 lives over the course of about a week. It’s been hotter than usually in the Pacific Northwest, where I live. We had multiple days in a row above 90, which may not sound bad to those of you used to sweltering summers, but in general folks out here don’t have air conditioning (and if you do have it but you don’t have the money for an electric bill of gargantuan proportions, you might just leave it off). My apartment in the evenings was often still in the mid-upper 80s, and we don’t even get any direct sunlight (thank goodness for north-facing windows). I also work in public health emergency preparedness, so I have an extra special interest in things that cause a whole lot of people to get sick and die at once. Author Dr. Klinenberg is originally from Chicago, and earned his PhD in Sociology at UC Berkely in 2000. Heat Wave is his dissertation, exploring not just the health causes of those 700 deaths, but the social causes. His thesis is that the hot days didn’t kill these people alone; the systems society has set up (or not set up) instead failed many of these people in a complicated way that would be dangerous to ignore if we seek to avoid it in the future. Much of his work focuses on comparing two neighborhoods that are very similar in some of the basic demographics, and even have the same microclimate, but had VERY different death rates. In one neighborhood (95% black), 40 out of 100,000 residents died in the heat wave; in the neighborhood next door (86% Latino), only 4 out of 100,000 residents died. That is a huge difference, and one that we should try to explain. Beyond this, he looks at the role of city government and how they responded (or failed to respond), from the front-line police officers who were tasked with community policing but didn’t check in on the community, through the fire chiefs who ignored warnings from their staff that they should have more ambulances available, to the health commissioner who didn’t really ‘get’ that something was amiss. Dr. Klinenberg also explores the role the media played in not treated the story with the gravity it deserved until late into the heat wave. Even if you aren’t interested in public health preparedness, or aren’t into sociological profiles, I think you might find this book to be quite fascinating. I’m impressed with the readability of what is essentially someone’s dissertation, and I think I can learn a lot that will be helpful to me in professional life. This book got me back on track for my cannonball read, too, so I’m quite grateful for that. I haven’t finished a book in nearly three weeks. Between going to Canada for five World Cup matches (including the final – woo!), my computer dying, and learning that my back-up system failed, plus the aforementioned ridiculous heat wave we had, I’ve mostly wanted to just sit on my ass and play games on my phone. But no more! I’m back to reading and it feels fantastic. ( ) ASKelmore | Jul 9, 2017 |  ) wealhtheowwylfing | Feb 29, 2016 | abiotteau | Apr 21, 2010 | sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
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. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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