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 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.
