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Loading... A Crack in the Edge of the Worldby Simon Winchester
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Winchester is sometimes guilty of confusing wordiness with descriptiveness. All his books have a plodding element that prevents them from joining the ranks of their betters. His writing needs a braver editor to confront this and push back. He neither succeeds as a rigorous or inspiring writer of science, nor as an insightful observer of socioeconomic history. But he tries. Enjoyable but fails to impress. I will pretty much read anything Simon Winchester writes, so this might bias my review somewhat. Nevertheless, this is one of my favorites. The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire hits closer to home than the eruption of Krakatoa, and the effects on California history are fascinating. I didn't devour it the way I did some of his other works, but this book is ideal to read as a series of related vignettes. Covers the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 as well as explores the history, cause, and other related topics of earthquakes and plate movement. Some of the side topics the author covers seem to be very far afield. Simon Winchester delivers another stellar non-fiction study of an historical event and its ramifications. As he did in "Krakatoa", Winchester delves deeply into the geological record to help the reader understand the mechanism that produced California's fault lines, including the San Andreas fault, and those fault lines' part in creating California's topography. Along the way, he provides a succinct history of San Francisco, from its origin as a squalid tent city at the beginning of the Gold Rush through its transformation into a sophisticated and sparkling urban center. Throw in local politics, crooked developers, and a little regional rivalry, and voila! A highly entertaining narrative of one of the most significant earthquakes in California's long history. Good stuff, and highly recommended. no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0060571993, Hardcover)Geologically speaking, 1906 was a violent year: powerful, destructive earthquakes shook the ground from Taiwan to South America, while in Italy, Mount Vesuvius erupted. And in San Francisco, a large earthquake occurred just after five in the morning on April 18--and that was just the beginning. The quake caused a conflagration that raged for the next three days, destroying much of the American West's greatest city. The fire, along with water damage and other indirect acts, proved more destructive than the earthquake itself, but insurance companies tried hard to dispute this fact since few people carried earthquake insurance. It was also the world's first major natural disaster to have been extensively photographed and covered by the media, and as a result, it left "an indelible imprint on the mind of the entire nation."Though the epicenter of this marvelously constructed book is San Francisco, Winchester covers much more than just the disaster. He discusses how this particular quake led to greater scientific study of quakes in an attempt to understand the movements of the earth. Trained at Oxford University as a geologist, Winchester is well qualified to discuss the subject, and he clearly explains plate tectonics theory (first introduced in 1968) and the creation of the San Andreas Fault, along with the geologic exploration of the American West in the late 19th century and the evolution of technology used to measure and predict earthquakes. He also covers the social and political shifts caused by the disaster, such as the way that Pentecostalists viewed the quake as "a message of divine approval" and used it to recruit new members into the church, and the rise in the local Chinese population. With many records destroyed in the fire, there was no way to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants, and thus many more Chinese were granted citizenship than would have otherwise been. Filled with eyewitness accounts, vivid descriptions, crisp prose, and many delightful meanderings, A Crack in the Edge of the World is a thoroughly absorbing tale. --Shawn Carkonen (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:09 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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Winchester doesn’t just focus on the physical geology of earthquakes, although there is plenty of that. A full social history of San Francisco, before and after the quake, is also presented, and as someone who knows a bit about the subject, I can say that the information is accurate and entertaining.
Winchester’s formal training at Cambridge was in geology, and, like John McPhee, took a sharp turn from that discipline into journalism. With both of them I find the same love of fact and detail, and luckily for us, the ability to weave facts into accessible prose. I’m gathering more of Winchester’s books to see what I’ve missed. (