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A Crack in the Edge of the World
Simon Winchester
America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
HarperCollins
October 2005
480 pages
ISBN: 0060571993
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Historical
The international bestselling author of The Professor and
the Madman and Krakatoa vividly brings to life
the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city
symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon
Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative
informative look at the tumultuous subterranean world that
produces earthquakes, the planet's most sudden and
destructive force. In the early morning hours of
April 18, 1906, San Francisco and a string of towns to its
north-northwest and the south-southeast were overcome by an
enormous shaking that was compounded by the violent shocks
of an earthquake, registering 8.25 on the Richter scale. The
quake resulted from a rupture in a part of the San Andreas
fault, which lies underneath the earth's surface along the
northern coast of California. Lasting little more than a
minute, the earthquake wrecked 490 blocks, toppled a total
of 25,000 buildings, broke open gas mains, cut off electric
power lines throughout the Bay area, and effectively
destroyed the gold rush capital that had stood there for a
half century. Perhaps more significant than the
tremors and rumbling, which affected a swatch of California
more than 200 miles long, were the fires that took over the
city for three days, leaving chaos and horror in its wake.
The human tragedy included the deaths of upwards of 700
people, with more than 250,000 left homeless. It was perhaps
the worst natural disaster in the history of the United
States. Simon Winchester brings his inimitable
storytelling abilities -- as well as his unique
understanding of geology -- to this extraordinary event,
exploring not only what happened in northern California in
1906 but what we have learned since about the geological
underpinnings that caused the earthquake in the first place.
But his achievement is even greater: he positions the
quake's significance along the earth's geological timeline
and shows the effect it had on the rest of twentieth-century
California and American history. A Crack in the
Edge of the World is the definitive account of the San
Francisco earthquake. It is also a fascinating exploration
of a legendary event that changed the way we look at the
planet on which we live.
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