100 books like Heat Wave

By Eric Klinenberg,

Here are 100 books that Heat Wave fans have personally recommended if you like Heat Wave. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Book cover of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

Daniel P. Aldrich Author Of Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery

From my list on the importance of community during disasters.

Why am I passionate about this?

We moved to New Orleans in July 2005. We had six weeks in our first home, filling it with furniture, buying a new car, and taking advantage of my first job. When Hurricane Katrina collapsed the levees holding back the nearby lakes, our home – and those of 80% of the city – filled with water. As I waited for FEMA and insurance to help us, I saw instead it was our friends, friends of friends, and faith-based organizations that helped us get back on our feet. Using our own experiences as a start, I traveled to India and Japan to study how communities around the world survived and thrived during shocks. 

Daniel's book list on the importance of community during disasters

Daniel P. Aldrich Why did Daniel love this book?

We have all seen disaster movies and TV shows with people screaming and running around as the earthquake, tsunami, or Godzilla strikes. But Rebecca Solnit argues instead that normal people don’t panic during disasters – it is the elite, the wealthy, and the decision-makers who lose their minds. For normal people, altruism and mutual aid help all of us get through shocks, whether fire, car accident or COVID19. Her writing is excellent and she uses examples across time and space, ranging from the San Francisco earthquake at the start of the 20th century to the Mexico City earthquake at its end.

By Rebecca Solnit,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked A Paradise Built in Hell as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"The freshest, deepest, most optimistic account of human nature I've come across in years."
-Bill McKibben

The most startling thing about disasters, according to award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides. A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster's grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of…


Book cover of The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Alex Marshall Author Of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken

From my list on why cities and suburbs function the way they do.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have always been drawn to community, meaning how people get together, live, love, and support each other. That love drew me into caring about cities, in all their various forms, because cities are places for people to gather and build lives together. This can be in an Italian hilltown from the 1000 AD, a 15th-century neighborhood in Barcelona, an elegant street on the Upper East Side of New York City, or a subdivision near a highway interchange in Phoenix. Once I started caring about cities, I started asking why these places are the way they are, and this produced my book.

Alex's book list on why cities and suburbs function the way they do

Alex Marshall Why did Alex love this book?

Jane Jacob’s groundbreaking, disruptive classic is first on many people’s lists. A journalist without a college degree and no formal training in urban planning, she blew up the once-established view that old-fashioned streets and buildings were done for, and that towers in the park surrounded by highways and parking lots were the way to go. Her portrait of her neighborhood in the West Village is deeply moving, and she almost single-handedly brought back these types of places as ideals.

However, she missed a lot. She didn’t understand the importance of infrastructure. She barely mentions the subways. She described her beloved streets as if they grew there, which was not the case. Reading this classic with a critical eye is the best way to do it. Jane Jacobs has become Saint Jane to many, but it’s important to see what she missed and what she got right.

By Jane Jacobs,

Why should I read it?

13 authors picked The Death and Life of Great American Cities as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this classic text, Jane Jacobs set out to produce an attack on current city planning and rebuilding and to introduce new principles by which these should be governed. The result is one of the most stimulating books on cities ever written.

Throughout the post-war period, planners temperamentally unsympathetic to cities have been let loose on our urban environment. Inspired by the ideals of the Garden City or Le Corbusier's Radiant City, they have dreamt up ambitious projects based on self-contained neighbourhoods, super-blocks, rigid 'scientific' plans and endless acres of grass. Yet they seldom stop to look at what actually…


Book cover of Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy

Daniel P. Aldrich Author Of Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery

From my list on the importance of community during disasters.

Why am I passionate about this?

We moved to New Orleans in July 2005. We had six weeks in our first home, filling it with furniture, buying a new car, and taking advantage of my first job. When Hurricane Katrina collapsed the levees holding back the nearby lakes, our home – and those of 80% of the city – filled with water. As I waited for FEMA and insurance to help us, I saw instead it was our friends, friends of friends, and faith-based organizations that helped us get back on our feet. Using our own experiences as a start, I traveled to India and Japan to study how communities around the world survived and thrived during shocks. 

Daniel's book list on the importance of community during disasters

Daniel P. Aldrich Why did Daniel love this book?

Sheryl Sandberg movingly tells the story of losing her husband suddenly and having to continue with her family on her own. Grief seems a solitary process that we have to work through by ourselves. But she describes how her process of recovery required connections with friends, with family, and with institutions in her neighborhood. All of us have to deal with personal tragedies like the deaths of loved ones, and I appreciated how this book combined her sharing her personal experience with broader expertise from psychology and social science.

By Sheryl Sandberg, Adam Grant,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Option B as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From Facebook's COO and Wharton's top-rated professor, the #1 New York Times best-selling authors of Lean In and Originals: a powerful, inspiring, and practical book about building resilience and moving forward after life's inevitable setbacks.

After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure joy again. "I was in 'the void,'" she writes, "a vast emptiness that fills your heart and lungs and restricts your ability to think or even breathe." Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are concrete steps people can take to…


Book cover of Weathering Katrina: Culture and Recovery among Vietnamese Americans

Daniel P. Aldrich Author Of Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery

From my list on the importance of community during disasters.

Why am I passionate about this?

We moved to New Orleans in July 2005. We had six weeks in our first home, filling it with furniture, buying a new car, and taking advantage of my first job. When Hurricane Katrina collapsed the levees holding back the nearby lakes, our home – and those of 80% of the city – filled with water. As I waited for FEMA and insurance to help us, I saw instead it was our friends, friends of friends, and faith-based organizations that helped us get back on our feet. Using our own experiences as a start, I traveled to India and Japan to study how communities around the world survived and thrived during shocks. 

Daniel's book list on the importance of community during disasters

Daniel P. Aldrich Why did Daniel love this book?

As someone who lived in New Orleans before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina, I often wondered why different communities bounced back from that terrible flooding. Mark van Landingham finds that, despite low levels of English fluency, education, and income, the Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American community of Village De L’Est brought back more people and businesses than any other part of the city. Within a year they were back to 90% capacity of pre-Katrina levels. This community's residents – connected to each other through Catholicism and a shared language and history – worked collectively to help evacuees who had scattered across the country. Through collective action, they rebuilt their community even better, adding in new schools, medical centers, and even urban farms.

By Mark J. VanLandingham,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Weathering Katrina as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The principal Vietnamese-American enclave was a remote, low-income area that flooded badly. Many residents arrived decades earlier as refugees from the Vietnam War and were marginally fluent in English. Yet, despite these poor odds of success, the Vietnamese made a surprisingly strong comeback in the wake of the flood. In Weathering Katrina, public health scholar Mark VanLandingham analyzes their path to recovery, and examines the extent to which culture helped them cope during this crisis.


Contrasting his longitudinal survey data and qualitative interviews of Vietnamese residents with the work of other research teams,…


Book cover of The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster

Daniel P. Aldrich Author Of Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery

From my list on the importance of community during disasters.

Why am I passionate about this?

We moved to New Orleans in July 2005. We had six weeks in our first home, filling it with furniture, buying a new car, and taking advantage of my first job. When Hurricane Katrina collapsed the levees holding back the nearby lakes, our home – and those of 80% of the city – filled with water. As I waited for FEMA and insurance to help us, I saw instead it was our friends, friends of friends, and faith-based organizations that helped us get back on our feet. Using our own experiences as a start, I traveled to India and Japan to study how communities around the world survived and thrived during shocks. 

Daniel's book list on the importance of community during disasters

Daniel P. Aldrich Why did Daniel love this book?

We can all think of cities that have been hit by some horrible events – envision Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, hit by atomic weapons. Or the Oklahoma City bombing that leveled a whole block. Yet these cities not only survived, but thrived. In chapters written by different experts from around the world this book shows how resilient cities are to shocks and disasters. I especially liked the way that the authors focus on the way that we memorialize and remember the past, trying to learn lessons from shocks and bringing those emotions and learning into the present.

By Lawrence J. Vale (editor), Thomas J. Campanella (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Resilient City as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

For as long as they have existed, cities have been destroyed-sacked, shaken, burnt, bombed, flooded, starved, irradiated, and pillaged-in almost every case they have risen again. Rarely in modern times has a city not been rebuilt following destruction, be it natural or man-made. The Resilient City explores urban disasters from around the globe and the ongoing restoration of urban life. It examines why cities are rebuilt, how a vision for the future gets
incorporated into a new urban landscape, and how disasters have been interpreted and commemorated in built form. An international cast of historians, architects, and urban studies experts…


Book cover of Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See

Todd Swanstrom Author Of The Changing American Neighborhood: The Meaning of Place in the Twenty-First Century

From my list on why neighborhoods still matter.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, in a neighborhood that was stable, safe, and stimulating. After my freshman year in college, I signed up for an “urban experience” in Detroit. It turned out to be the summer of the Detroit riots. I woke up to U.S. Army vehicles rumbling into the park across from my apartment. Over the next month, I witnessed the looting and burning of whole neighborhoods. I remember thinking:  what a waste! Why are we throwing away neighborhoods like Kleenex? I have been trying to answer that question ever since.   

Todd's book list on why neighborhoods still matter

Todd Swanstrom Why did Todd love this book?

I’ve often thought that discrimination against poor people is the last socially acceptable prejudice. Kahlenberg proves me correct.

While racial segregation has declined, economic segregation has increased exponentially. Kahlenberg exposes the myths and false arguments that justify economic discrimination. He shows that excluding the poor is most common in liberal communities on the two coasts.

Research demonstrates that where we grow up has a powerful effect on our ability to succeed in school and the job market, demolishing the idea that we are a meritocracy and that rich people deserve to live behind invisible walls in privileged communities.  

By Richard D. Kahlenberg,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Excluded as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The last, acceptable form of prejudice in America is based on class and executed through state-sponsored economic discrimination, which is hard to see because it is much more subtle than raw racism.

While the American meritocracy officially denounces prejudice based on race and gender, it has spawned a new form of bias against those with less education and income. Millions of working-class Americans have their opportunity blocked by exclusionary snob zoning. These government policies make housing unaffordable, frustrate the goals of the civil rights movement, and lock in inequality in our urban and suburban landscapes.

Through moving accounts of families…


Book cover of A Haven and a Hell: The Ghetto in Black America

Todd Swanstrom Author Of The Changing American Neighborhood: The Meaning of Place in the Twenty-First Century

From my list on why neighborhoods still matter.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, in a neighborhood that was stable, safe, and stimulating. After my freshman year in college, I signed up for an “urban experience” in Detroit. It turned out to be the summer of the Detroit riots. I woke up to U.S. Army vehicles rumbling into the park across from my apartment. Over the next month, I witnessed the looting and burning of whole neighborhoods. I remember thinking:  what a waste! Why are we throwing away neighborhoods like Kleenex? I have been trying to answer that question ever since.   

Todd's book list on why neighborhoods still matter

Todd Swanstrom Why did Todd love this book?

The civil rights movement was a great triumph, but I’ve always suspected that we lost something along the way–or maybe this solution just created new problems.

Lance Freeman shows how the pre-civil rights ghetto, enforced by racist laws, was often a hothouse of Black culture, Black-controlled institutions, and Black power. The contemporary Black ghetto, largely abandoned by the middle class, is a place of concentrated poverty and despair.

We never want to go back to Jim Crow, but we need to address the concentrated poverty that is eviscerating many neighborhoods. Rejecting simplistic understandings of gentrification, Freeman shows that Black gentrification, under the right circumstances, could make Black spaces havens again. Freeman is not only smart, I think, but brave in challenging conventional wisdom. 

By Lance Freeman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Haven and a Hell as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The black ghetto is thought of as a place of urban decay and social disarray. Like the historical ghetto of Venice, it is perceived as a space of confinement, one imposed on black America by whites. It is the home of a marginalized underclass and a sign of the depth of American segregation. Yet while black urban neighborhoods have suffered from institutional racism and economic neglect, they have also been places of refuge and community.

In A Haven and a Hell, Lance Freeman examines how the ghetto shaped black America and how black America shaped the ghetto. Freeman traces the…


Book cover of A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America

Todd Swanstrom Author Of The Changing American Neighborhood: The Meaning of Place in the Twenty-First Century

From my list on why neighborhoods still matter.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, in a neighborhood that was stable, safe, and stimulating. After my freshman year in college, I signed up for an “urban experience” in Detroit. It turned out to be the summer of the Detroit riots. I woke up to U.S. Army vehicles rumbling into the park across from my apartment. Over the next month, I witnessed the looting and burning of whole neighborhoods. I remember thinking:  what a waste! Why are we throwing away neighborhoods like Kleenex? I have been trying to answer that question ever since.   

Todd's book list on why neighborhoods still matter

Todd Swanstrom Why did Todd love this book?

Benjamin Looker shows how an idealized image of neighborhoods animated cultural and political identities from World War II to the Reagan era.

I was particularly fascinated by his treatment of the 1970s when “power to the neighborhoods” was a rallying cry for both the left and the right. Jimmy Carter used neighborhood rhetoric to mobilize urban ethnics in 1976, while Ronald Reagan outdid him in 1980, using the gauzy rhetoric of neighborhood empowerment to mask his lack of support for federal policies to help neighborhoods.

This incredibly well-researched scholarly book is wonderfully written and sparkling with insights.   

By Benjamin Looker,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Nation of Neighborhoods as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Despite the pundits who have written its epitaph and the latter-day refugees who have fled its confines for the half-acre suburban estate, the city neighborhood has endured as an idea central to American culture. In A Nation of Neighborhoods, Benjamin Looker presents us with the city neighborhood as both an endless problem and a possibility. Looker investigates the cultural, social, and political complexities of the idea of "neighborhood" in postwar America and how Americans grappled with vast changes in their urban spaces from World War II to the Reagan era. In the face of urban decline, competing visions of the…


Book cover of Eight Faces at Three: A John J. Malone Mystery

Angela M. Sanders Author Of Witch upon a Star

From my list on screwball mysteries from the golden age of detection.

Why am I passionate about this?

Between humor and pathos, I lean humor. Even the saddest, most shocking events—murder, for instance—can be wrapped in kookiness. Combine this outlook with my love of old things (I’m sitting on a 1920s Chinese wedding bed and drinking from an etched Victorian tumbler at this very moment), and you’ll understand why I’m drawn to vintage screwball detective fiction. Although my mystery novels are cozies, I can’t help but infuse them with some of this screwball wackiness. I want readers to laugh, of course, but also to use my stories as springboards to see the hilarity and wonder in their own lives. 

Angela's book list on screwball mysteries from the golden age of detection

Angela M. Sanders Why did Angela love this book?

If screwball detective fiction intrigues you, you must read Craig Rice. Why not start with Eight Faces of Three, the mystery introducing the wacky, rye-soaked team of Jake Justus, Helene Brand, and John Joseph Malone?

Justus is a good-looking press agent and the book’s moral center; Brand is a gorgeous heiress and non-stop partier; and Malone is a stumpy lawyer-slash-PI with good instincts and better luck. Imagine Philip Marlowe meets the Marx Brothers.

In Eight Faces of Three, a young woman awakes to find her aunt murdered, all the house’s clocks set to 3 am, and herself the prime suspect.

Craig Rice was the first mystery writer to grace the cover of Time magazine. Her private life was strewn with ex-husbands and empty booze bottles, and she died way too young at 49.

However, her literary legacy—one critic dubbed her the “Dorothy Parker of detective fiction”—will keep her…

By Craig Rice,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Eight Faces at Three as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Pioneering woman crime writer Craig Rice introduces her series sleuth, gin-soaked Chicago lawyer John J. Malone

John J. Malone, defender of the guilty, is notorious for getting his culpable clients off. It’s the innocent ones who are problems. Like Holly Inglehart, accused of piercing the black heart of her well-heeled and tyrannical aunt Alexandria with a lovely Florentine paper cutter. No one who knew the old battle-ax liked her, but Holly’s prints were found on the murder weapon. Plus, she had a motive: She was about to be disinherited for marrying a common bandleader.

With each new lurid headline, Holly’s…


Book cover of He Had It Coming: Four Murderous Women and the Reporter Who Immortalized Their Stories

Silvia Pettem Author Of In Search of the Blonde Tigress: The Untold Story of Eleanor Jarman

From my list on mysterious and intriguing women in history.

Why am I passionate about this?

I've been writing for decades, as one genre evolved into another. Local Colorado history led to the identification of "Boulder Jane Doe," a murder victim. During that journey I learned a lot about criminal investigations and forensics. I devoured old movies (especially film noir), and I focused on social history including mysterious and intriguing women. Midwest Book Review (see author book links) credits In Search of the Blonde Tigress as "rescuing" Eleanor Jarman "from obscurity." So true! Despite Eleanor's notoriety as "the most dangerous woman alive," she actually was a very ordinary woman. I've now found my niche pulling mysterious and intriguing women out of the shadows.

Silvia's book list on mysterious and intriguing women in history

Silvia Pettem Why did Silvia love this book?

Using photo and newspaper archives from the Chicago Tribune, the authors of He Had It Coming tell the stories of four Chicago female murderers from the 1920s.

The documentation (both primary and secondary sources) and, especially, the newspaper's original high-quality historical photographs inspired me to dig deeply into similar archives when researching and writing my book.

By Kori Rumore, Marianne Mather,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked He Had It Coming as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Beulah Annan. Belva Gaertner. Kitty Malm. Sabella Nitti. These are the real women of Chicago.

You probably know Roxie and Velma, the good-time gals of the 1926 satirical play Chicago and its wildly successful musical and movie adaptations. You might not know that Roxie, Velma, and the rest of the colorful characters of the play were inspired by real prisoners held in "Murderess Row" in 1920s Chicago-or that the reporter who covered their trials for the Chicago Tribune went on to write the play Chicago.

Now, more than 90 years later, the Chicago Tribune has uncovered photographs and newspaper clippings…


5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in Illinois, Chicago, and seniors?

Illinois 86 books
Chicago 392 books
Seniors 35 books