A Crack in the Edge of the World : America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906

A Crack in the Edge of the World : America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 Simon Winchester Date: 04 October, 2005   —   $18.45   —   Book product page Rating:

Nonfiction, History

Winchester is an interesting read, but not usually about the thing that you think you're going to be reading about. This book is theoretically about the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, but like Krakatoa, it takes over two hundred pages for Winchester to get to the purported subject of the book.

So he talks about geology, and the great Missouri quakes of the nineteenth century, and Hayward, and the geology meeting that sparked the thinking about plate tectonics, and a Southern California town whose prime claim to fame is its high quality seismographs, and just about everything but the quake. But that's okay.

Just so long as you aren't expecting a blow-by-blow account.