This was an impulse purchase a week or so ago, and I'm VERY glad indeed that I didn't start reading it until the hot weather broke (briefly) in New York this past weekend, as it's the chilling (sorry, bad pun) story of the 1896 New York heatwave that killed thousands, mostly poor working men and infants.
Kohn begins his story of a week in August by describing a horrific death toll of another kind -- the result of a railway crash. To New Yorkers, by the time the 19th century was drawing to a close, it seemed as if natural disasters had been replaced by those associated with man-made phenomena of various kinds -- until the heat wave struck, and they were reminded forcibly that some things, like the weather, can't always be conquered.
But the best thing about this book isn't the chronicle of misery during the heatwave, but the way Kotman weaves that horrifying story of death (including the deaths of horses in the streets, left to rot for days...) into the political climate of the day. At first, I was tempted to ask what the connection was, other than that of timing -- the presidential nominees for the Republican and Democratic parties had recently been selected -- but Kohn quickly makes clear where he's going. He's telling the story of the way in which the heatwave indirectly contributed to the end of the political ambitions of populist demagogue William Jennings Bryan, whose campaign hit the skids in New York on the same day that the heat wave peaked, for reasons that Kotman argues have as much to do with the heatwave as with Bryan's own unwelcome opinions. (There's a lot here about the battle to add silver as a reserve currency, and bimetallism, which is interesting, if you care to forge through it.) But it's also the tale of Theodore Roosevelt's ascendancy to political power, which took on fresh momentum in the wake of the heatwave. To borrow a phrase, it was the tipping point in both their political ambitions.
There's also plenty of fascinating detail about how people in New York's tenements really lived at the time -- despite having visited the Tenement Museum on the lower east side, Kohn's vivid prose brought this to life for me in a way that I hadn't experienced before. These days, people hold parties on their rooftops; in the late 19th century people slept there, despite melting tar and the risk of rolling over the parapet to their deaths, because it was the only way to catch a breath of air that wasn't fetid.
An excellent story, not only fascinating because it deals with the story of how people lived at the time, but because Kohn weaves into it the historical, political and social context. As the world gets hotter and our society even more urbanized than it was in 1896, we take refuge in our "cooling centers" and air-conditioned rooms -- but this book offers a lot of food for thought. I expect every time the thermometer jumps above 90 Fahrenheit, I'll be thinking about this...
4.5 stars, rounded up. Just don't read it in a heatwave.
