THE SUMMER OF DEATH

Exceptionally hot weather, back when most Americans couldn’t escape it.

Williams, author of C.C. Pyle’s Amazing Foot Race (2007), specializes in oddball niche historical events that are often less amusing the closer they are examined. Our warming planet is breaking heat records, but many that remain unbroken date from 1936, a year whose meteorological quirks often attracted more attention than Hitler. The book opens in January, which turned out to be among the coldest in history, but quickly moves on to an unnaturally warm spring and hellish summer. Beaches were packed, and Williams writes of the era’s legal standards of indecency: Men were ticketed for exposing their upper bodies, and families routinely slept on porches and lawns and in cars, public parks, and movie theaters. Air conditioners (invented in 1902) remained too expensive for Depression-era households. A unit that could cool a room cost $400 (more than $9,000 today) and weighed roughly 600 pounds. Williams summarizes what little scientists knew of Earth’s temperature cycles and the state of cooling technology, but mostly he delivers 65 chronological chapters of what reporters documented: victim after victim suffering and often dying during hot weather. Readers will encounter a steady stream of vivid, usually heartrending anecdotes. Victims grew sick and often collapsed; some crashed their cars, fell off roofs, and killed themselves (and, occasionally, others). Zoo animals escaped, as did monkeys—they were popular pets at the time. The author writes, “If you were a police officer in 1936, pursuing a monkey was practically part of the job description.”

A breathless account of a Depression-era heat wave, long-forgotten.