McClelland’s most recent book, Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Built the Middle Class,
is a narrative account of the 1936-37 Flint Sit Down Strike, which led to the establishment of the United Auto Workers as the nation’s flagship labor union. His previous book, How to Speak Midwestern, is a guide to the speech and sayings of Middle America, which The New York Times called “a dictionary wrapped in some serious dialectology inside a gift book trailing a serious whiff of Relevance.”
At Chicago magazine McClelland tagged ten of Chicago’s best non-fiction books of the 21st Century including:
Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg (2002)Read about the other entries on the list.
In July of 1995, the temperature in Chicago reached 106 degrees. More than 700 people died, many of them isolated senior citizens who suffocated alone in tiny apartments. Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University and a Chicago native, conducted what he called a “social autopsy” of the disaster. Not surprisingly, he found the causes were rooted in the eternal Chicago ills of racism, segregation, inequality and disinvestment. Those problems will always be with Chicago, but new ordinances requiring A/C units in apartments have prevented more mass heat deaths, even as summers have gotten warmer.
--Marshal Zeringue
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