I am writing this review in the midst of a Chicago heat wave, almost exactly seven years after the heat disaster that killed nearly 800 people in the city. The Chicago Tribune's multicolored weather page adorns the forecast with a special "excessive heat watch" symbol--an exclamation point lodged in a red circle--newscasters earnestly tell us to stay inside and take it easy, and veteran black radio deejay Herb Kent, the Kool Gent, chats on-air about liquor and caffeinated drinks being dehydrating and the need to drink lots of "good old H₂O."

I remember the 1995 disaster well, but for me personally it was a period of intensive work on my last book, cooped up indoors 24/7, with roaring air-conditioning, punctuated by horrified reading of the Tribune's coverage of rolling city power outages and the growing spectacle of hundreds of heat-related deaths, with the bodies piling up and overwhelming the city morgue's capacity. Suspicious of the Tribune because of its long history of rightist and racist slants, I scrutinized the stories to see if the city was, as usual, shortchanging its black South and West sides on services, but couldn't figure anything out. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg, a young Chicago native, was out of the country during the disaster, but has since then more than made up for lost time. His Heat Wave is a trenchant, multilayered and well-written social autopsy of the disaster.

Since finishing Heat Wave, I've been obsessively asking friends, neighbors, students and colleagues if they were in town in July 1995, and if so, what they remember. Most of my middle-class interlocutors were as insulated as I was, in cooled rooms, and only vaguely remember the period because of media coverage. But many younger people, who were then living on student or first-job budgets, told tales of extreme misery and multiple palliative strategies--double bills at air-conditioned theaters, plunging into Lake Michigan every possible nonworking hour, bunking with better-off friends and relatives, long drives in cars with AC and, of course, all the old tricks with cold water, towels and fans. One conservative young woman described her sudden comprehension, lying sweaty and wretched in her sweltering apartment, listening to neighbors' AC compressors turning on, of the ressentiment and violence of some inner-city dwellers.

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