OSI Fellow Discusses New Book on NPR

One morning in July 1995 Chicagoans awoke to a deadly heat wave that wouldn't break for a week. Temperatures would reach 106 degrees. City streets would buckle. Electrical use would soar and power grids would fail, leaving nearly 50,000 people without electricity and water. Over the course of that week, more than 700 people would perish, many of them poor and elderly and at home alone.

In Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, Eric Klinenberg, a professor of sociology at New York University and an OSI Individual Project Fellow, examines the cracks in Chicago's social foundation that made this disaster much worse than it ought to have been.

Klinenberg, whose book has been featured in the Nation, the New Yorker, and the New York Times, was interviewed on August 15, 2002 on the National Public Radio program "Fresh Air."

Click here to listen to Klinenberg's interview on NPR's "Fresh Air".