Dr. Carol Chetkovich is now a professor of Public Policy at Mills College in Oakland, California. Real Heat:Gender and Race in the Urban Fire Service started as research for her dissertation. In 1992, Carol started following “the men and women of the Oakland Fire Department Class 1-91 through their academy training and eighteen-month probation. Real Heat explores how the process of becoming a firefighter interacts with the dimensions of race and gender to support some and discourage others.” Its relevance just got revalidated with the recently published study “A National Report Card on Women in Firefighting (PDF).”

If you’ve never read Real Heat, you must. Maybe you read it when the book first came out in 1997. Read it again!

“A National Report Card on Women in Firefighting” presents the cold hard facts. Real Heat presents the experiences behind those facts. Chronologically, there’s a time difference of a decade. As a mirror of reality, it could be a year ago or today in thousands of fire departments across the country. Making it a story of our past that the fire service overcame requires a conscious effort to ‘get conscious’. Real Heat is a great way to do that.

You can order copies from the publisher Rutgers University Press or from Amazon.com or online from Barnes & Noble. Amazon.com has a few used copies available. Product details for ordering:

Real Heat

Subtitle: Gender and Race in the Urban Fire Service
Author: Carol Chetkovich
Publisher: Rutgers University Press (July 1997)
Cloth ISBN: 0-8135-2409-1
Paperback: ISBN 0-8135-2410-5