A Dangerous Place: California's Unsettling Fate

The late Marc Reisner, author of Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, tells Californians the truth about our strange choice to settle on seismically unstable ground. As he details it, San Francisco’s port made it an inevitable site for a major city, but Los Angeles was created out of nothing by land speculators--in both cases, these were the worst spots in the state for cities. Once a major city is established, it’s almost always rebuilt rather than moved, no matter how bad the damage or how grave the danger. The final third of the book is taken up with a graphic description of the effects of a 7.2 earthquake--far from a worst-case scenario--on the Bay Area. It’s an eye-opener that makes Sacramento look show more like a pretty good place to be--even though we’re not exactly shake-proof, either. (Reviewed in SN&R, 8-14-03, www.newsreview.com/sacramento/Content?oid=15642) show less

Mark Reisner’s last book (published posthumously) is high on my list of books my mother should never read. California, it’s true, is a dangerous place, a place where no one sane would live. Reisner’s story of California’s explosive growth in the face of harsh environmental conditions and threats is engaging, amusing, and well worth seeking out. Reisner’s death in 2000 is a great loss.

Too much time is taken up in this book with the author's fictional scenario, which, though interesting in places, drags on and is not helpful in dealing with his subject matter. One gets the feeling that he had too little information, and felt the need to pad the book with the fiction. If so, this could only be the result of incomplete research, since there is a multitude of information out there on earthquakes, and the subject of earthquakes along the San Andreas fault could fill several volumes.