Book reviews don’t often make the front page, but Harold Henderson’s “City On the Hot Seat”— an analysis of Northwestern sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s book Heat Wave—made for essential reading when it hit the Reader cover on July 25, 2002.
In his Reader essay (which can be read online) Henderson applauded much of Klinenberg’s “social autopsy,” but also poked holes in the author’s pat “left liberal” analysis that pointed a big finger at income inequality and the city’s increasing reliance of the privatization of services. (“We have collectively created the conditions that made it possible for so many Chicago residents to die in the summer of 1995,” said Klinenberg early in the book). Henderson noted the “Latino health paradox” and the fact that while blacks died at twice the rate as whites in the heat wave, comparatively poor and downtrodden Latinos died much less than either. Men also died at almost three times the rate of women—a “dramatically greater difference than that between racial and ethnic groups.”
