A Crack in the Edge of the World : America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
 
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ABOUT THE BOOK A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 FROM OUR EDITORS The story of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 has been told and retold by dozens of writers. Few of these authors, though, have possessed the narrative gifts or the scientific credentials of Simon Winchester. The author of Krakatoa and The Professor and the Madman is an Oxford University?trained geologist. He renders the cataclysm not merely as a one-minute earthquake followed by three days of deadly raging fires but as a geological event of lasting significance. FROM THE PUBLISHER 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 other towns were overcome by an earthquake registering 8.25 on the Richter scale, resulting from a rupture in the San Andreas fault. 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, and effectively destroyed the gold rush capital that had stood there for a half century. 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. A Crack in the Edge of the World is the definitive account of the San Francisco earthquake and a fascinating exploration of a legendary event that changed the way we look at the planet on which we live. SYNOPSIS The New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa takes an adventurous and informative look at earthquakes, as seen through the devastating quake in San Francisco in 1906. FROM THE CRITICS Bryan Burrough - The New York Times Book Review …this is not a straightforward account of the earthquake and subsequent fire but a first-person melange of geology textbook and travelogue grafted onto a recounting of the events that destroyed San Francisco 100 years ago next spring. It's a proudly idiosyncratic book…that places Winchester firmly in the category of author-as-raconteur…Maybe the problem is false advertising…subtitling [the book] America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 suggests not only a new narrative history but an analysis of how the quake changed the country. That's not here. What is here-consuming half the book, in fact-is a geology treatise delivered by a roguish old professor who is simply gaga for granite. Winchester has some obvious faults, but lack of enthusiasm isn't one of them. Publishers Weekly In this brawny page-turner, bestselling writer Winchester (Krakatoa, The Professor and the Madman) has crafted a magnificent testament to the power of planet Earth and the efforts of humankind to understand her. A master storyteller and Oxford trained geologist, Winchester effortlessly weaves together countless threads of interest, making a powerfully compelling narrative out of what he calls "the most lyrical and romantic of the sciences." Using the theory of plate tectonics introduced in 1968 by an obscure geologist, J. Tuzo Wilson, Winchester describes a planet in flux. Across the surface of the earth, huge land masses known as plates push and pull at each other. At 5:12 a.m. in 1906, the North American and Pacific plates did precisely that. Along a 300-mile fault east of the Gold Rush city of San Francisco, the earth, in Winchester's word, "shrugged." While the initial shock devastated large parts of the city, it was the firestorm that raged in the days following that nearly wi

Submitted On:

09 Sep 2007

File Author:

Winchester, Simon

File Size:

6.94 MB