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    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
    A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
    Ebook720 pages10 hours

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

    By Simon Winchester

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    The international bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa vividly brings to life the 1906San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 5, 2013
    ISBN9780062277459
    A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
    Author

    Simon Winchester

    Simon Winchester is the bestselling author of Atlantic, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World, The Surgeon of Crowthorne (The Professor and the Madman), The Fracture Zone, Outposts and Korea, among many other titles. In 2006 he was awarded the OBE. He lives in western Massachusetts and New York City.

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    Reviews for A Crack in the Edge of the World

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    • 3/5
      After the recent earthquake/tsunami/nuclear-meltdown in Japan I wanted to read a disaster book, and Simon Winchester offers light entertaining non-fiction about an old scar that has since healed, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (and fire). Most of the book is about earthquakes in general, and the potential for another big one in the near future. It's not Winchester's best book, it's mediocre really, and there are probably better earthquake books, but being an Anglophile I enjoy listening to his accent and tweedy style in audiobook format.Some of the things I learned: the San Andreas fault is currently 17' behind, meaning the next earthquake will shift at least that far in one big jolt. The other big fault in the USA, centered in Memphis TN, is caused by upwelling underneath the middle of the North American plate, like a pimple, and not plates rubbing together, like San Andreas. Thus when a quake hits Memphis, it's like a hammer hitting marble, the waves spread far across a solid plate, unlike San Andreas where the ground is fractured on the edge of the plates and waves dissipate quickly over distance. I also learned there is a town in CA where the San Andreas is constantly moving 24x7, at about the speed of fingernails growing.
    • 3/5
      I read this book for research purposes. While I did fill it with sticky notes and found the read overall quite rewarding, I was also left with a strong sense that it could have been a much better book.Winchester is a very knowledgeable fellow. The book is framed around his own travels to places like Iceland and then across North America, from Charleston, to New Madrid, and on westward to San Francisco. His goal is to explore tectonic theory and how the San Andreas Fault fits into the larger scheme of the living world. The data is quite interesting, but at the same time he rambles. It's like he came across too much good information and tried to squeeze it into one book. This creates a problem when a book about the 1906 earthquake doesn't get to the actual earthquake until page 241.This also creates the odd dilemma in that it felt like little of the book was on the actual quake. Information on the aftermath is interesting, such as the struggle to get insurance companies to pay up (especially German-based ones), and the plight of the Chinese and the ensuing wave of "Paper People" who tried to take advantage of or were genuinely lost because of the loss of immigration paperwork. He then, however, devotes too much space to how the "wrath of God" aspect of the earthquake inspired the Pentecostal church movement. Even his trip to Alaska to discuss the fascinating matter of how the pipeline has been created to withstand earthquakes is colored by derogatory comments on towns along the way, including a slam against Wal-mart that felt out of place in its arrogance.In all, its an interesting book that's diluted by too many tangents. Still worth reading, though, even if it caused me to roll my eyes or skim at times.
    • 4/5
      For a book about the California earthquake of 1906, Winchester spends a surprisingly small amount of time discussing this specific quake and its aftermath. Don't get me wrong, the course on plate tectonics, seismology, other historic earthquakes, and Winchester's typical travelog-style account aren't uninteresting in the least ... but I would have expected some more about the San Francisco event itself other than one massive chapter about two-thirds of the way through the book. It ends up feeling like less than the main focus in a book which may just try to do too much at once.
    • 5/5
      I was in a Seoul bookshop desperately looking for something appropriate in English when I saw "A Crack in the Edge of the World" sitting on a shelf. As a bonus, it was selling for about half of the normal (high) cost of an English language book in South Korea. I'd like to think it wasn't a bootleg.Anyhoo, this is a great read, covering issues around San Francisco's history and how it was the preeminent California city until the earthquake, geology, plate tectonics, Enrico Caruso and more. Winchester has a writing style that leaves you turning the page for more, which was a problem in this case as I was soon again left desperately looking for another English book in Seoul.
    • 4/5
      Winchester's prose is a bit purple, but the facts are interesting.
    • 4/5
      Winchester takes an oftentimes intriguing macro-view of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fire, but the most interesting parts of this pop-nonfiction recount are not necessarily the seismic elements. Though Winchester is apt to rehash--watch out for pedantic repetition if you already have even a passing understanding of plate tectonics--there are great passages about the human and physical history of San Francisco. Factoids abound, and some of the anecdotes are worthy of repeating to one's friends. Pruned a bit and without the somewhat tenuous personal-geological-discovery road trip subplot (especially the epilogue trip to Alaska, which seems shoehorned in), I'd give it four stars.
    • 5/5
      I have been to San Francisco a lot and it is hard to imagine the tremendous power lying just below the surface. Winchester again does his meticulous research to bring people and events alive.
    • 4/5
      Author Simon Winchester was originally trained as a geologist and it shows; the account manages to be technically correct, engagingly well written, and erudite (Winchester uses “thixotropic” in a sentence) simultaneously. This is not a chronological narrative; Winchesters segues faultlessly from first-person descriptions of the earthquake, to the history of San Francisco, to a detailed but highly readable explanation of plate tectonics, to accounts of earlier American earthquakes (1886 Charleston, 1811 New Madrid), to early geological surveys of the United States, to recent California quakes. Some of this comes as commentary to a cross-country trip Winchester took, with stops at historic intraplate earthquake sites (as well as Meers, Oklahoma, where paleoseismology shows huge fault displacements in the past few thousand years but nothing of particular interest in recent history). With a background firmly established (all the way to the first hint of plate tectonics, about 3 Gya), Winchester then gets back to the 1906 earthquake.
      Lots of fascinating eyewitness accounts of buildings falling over, the ground undulating, and general seismic mayhem. San Francisco was a machine politics city at the time, and many of the public building had been poorly constructed by politically connected contractors, resulting in collapse of many stone and brick buildings, while wooden buildings survived – temporarily. The earthquake was followed by fire, as numerous stoves overturned, gas lines ruptured, and electric wires shorted. With most of the water lines broken, the fire was eventually contained by dynamiting firebreaks. The politicians later seized on the fire as the “actual” cause of the disaster, believing that it would be easier to get financing to rebuild the city if it were not perceived as being in an earthquake zone. Official documents always referred to the “Great San Francisco Fire” rather than “Earthquake”. Insurance companies got into the act; those people who had policies covering earthquakes were told that the actual damage to their property was caused by fire, and those with fire insurance learned that their houses had been destroyed by an earthquake and reduced to a valueless heap of rubble before burning (Lloyd’s of London was an honorable exception to the trend and paid all claims).There’s a terrific appendix detailing the various earthquake magnitude and intensity measuring systems – Rossi-Forel, Omori, Mercalli-Cancani-Sieberg, Modified Mercalli, Medvedev-Sponheuer-Karnik, and European Macroseismic Intensity for intensity; and Richter for magnitude (although, unfortunately, he doesn’t explain why the Richter scale needed to be modified to handle ultralarge earthquakes). There’s also a short explanation of difference between S- and P- waves and how this is used to locate a distant earthquake.Terrific maps, great glossary and bibliography, and very entertaining as well as educational.
    • 4/5
      I read this book on a cruise heading to San Francisco and it enhanced my appreciation of the history of the town enormously. I must confess, as Winchester says in his book, San Francisco and the effects the earthquake had on it, were what I expected the book to be about, but it has fascinating anecdotes and digressions about exploration and settlement in the American West, about th odd habits and proclivities of geologist and other scholars involved in the study of geology. This book is well worth a read. Extremely entertaining.
    • 5/5
      I read this and gave it away to a friend who really loved it. Be sure to get the cover that opens out into a poster.
    • 1/5
      Too tecnical--not for the average reader, diod have some interesting spots, however.
    • 3/5
      Simon's writing was dry, relying to heavily on facts to draw the reader in. Other authors have managed to blend the factual research with individual accounts in a way that flows easily. Erik Larson did an excellent job with Isaac's Storm (an account of a hurricane), but Winchester fails to connect with the reader. Instead his book feels clinical, referring to one person's account of the earthquake as an "anecdotal example." I loved learning more about San Francisco's history and the science behind the earthquake, but I wish he had made the book less like a term paper.
    • 3/5
      This is more an American road trip in geology than an account of the San Fransico Earthquake of 1906. There is a road trip, through the geology of the North American tectonic plate. It is also a road trip through history. In both cases there are numerous asides of observation and mini-facts tending to irrlevance and distraction. But the main story as an explanation of the new geology of plate tetonics, and part of its intellectual invention, provides a manageable pathway to a good understanding of the complexities of the geological substance supporting and shaking human occupied California. Writing a book on this scale and range would be a big challenge. Reading it needs some work which is worthwhile. Winchester keeps the attention focused, provides explanations suited for the lay scientist and interested amateur. It is impressive writing as a combination of scientific geological history, impressions of landscape and humnan interests, and sympathetic though wry look at human challenges and foibles.
    • 5/5
      Simon Winchester has elevated the language of science to the language of poetry. His eloquence will hold the attention of and also captivate the reader with his brilliant explanation of the formation of the earth, the ocean floor, the plates that shift and slide to wreak havoc or as he might say cause mischief in so many places. He describes such things as the molten lava “breathing” beneath our surface in such a way that you see the river of fire. He describes the movement of the faults so that you see them slipping and sliding under each other, layered irregularly atop each other, forming ridges like those in a carpet, as commonplace as a crease in a piece of fabric. He uses metaphors and similes to enlighten the reader and make the subject fluid rather than as arid as science can sometimes be for the layman. When Winchester likens the movements of the plates to a freight train stuck on the tracks with only the center moving outward, the reader can surely see the force of that pressure as it moves the front of the cars forward, finally, in a burst, resulting in the return of that bulge to the center, although in the front there may be concomitant damage; and when he describes the ripple that erupts in a carpet, sometimes, after walking on it repeatedly, the reader will see that “pleat”, as he calls it, forming a mountain one day as it continues to rise. When he describes the splitting water mains and the rupturing gas lines, the reader can feel the disaster in San Francisco approaching, along with the heat, strong tremors and fear, as well as the astonishment and wonderment also felt by some victims. Winchester brought the dry science behind an earthquake and other natural disasters to life. I could visualize the earth forming, the continents moving and the oceans spreading as the earth moved beneath me. With a vocabulary that has become obsolete in the pens of most writers, as they concentrate on sound bites and acronyms, he has mastered the art of prose, making often unfathomable subject matter less bone-dry with his use of language.Winchester speaks of Freud, Einstein, and Caruso in a casual manner as he creates the foundation for his story with vignettes that sometimes make the reader smile. He begins with the moon landing of Neil Armstong and tells the story of our magnificent planet. Viewing the earth from that bird’s eye view, he describes the inner core beneath the earth’s crust so well that you think you are listening to the secrets of a mystery novel that are slowly being fleshed out, when actually you are being presented with scientific facts. Traveling up and down the western coast of the United States, his explanations burst with information that are at once comprehensible rather than opaque. His research gleaned from journals, diaries and letters is impeccable and his knowledge coupled with his writing skill has made this a very enjoyable, informative read. I know that he placed me in San Francisco at the moment of the quake. I could almost feel the turmoil as the earth raged beneath its surface wreaking havoc above it.Today, the technology has improved so much that analysis is done by machines more often then people, but the first hand accounts did not contain the coldness of the machine, and therefore the story was connected to emotion. I learned of the reputation San Francisco had when it was born, I could see the cavalier attitude that prevailed, the indifference to any impending disaster, although there had already been some in the previous century. He even draws a relationship between the rise of radical faiths like Islam and Pentacostal Evangelists during catastrophic times, equating the catastrophes to a sign of G-d’s displeasure and a need for doubling down on their dogma. His analysis of the behavior of the insurance companies during the disaster is still relevant today! Although I cannot profess to have understood every word of this highly detailed and descriptive book, concentrating on the April, 17, 1906, San Francisco earthquake, I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this author read his own book with just the right tone and emotion to capture my ear completely. The book is both entertaining and informative.
    • 4/5
      [Simon Winchester] is a marvelous writer and though this work is not the equal of [[The Meaning of Everything]] or of [[Krakratoa]] it has to be one of best ever written about an earthquake that ocurred before Winchester was born. He covers the earthquake from every angle and he does it in such a way that you feel like you were there to see it in person. He gives you the history of San Francisco, he gives you the science of earthquakes, he gives you the events of the day of the quake and he describes the panic of the people in the quake and the misery of the thousands left homeless. He tells about the government of San Francisco and the lack of any building codes and the disheveled fire department with its useless fire hoses because their was no water in the fire hydrants. Winchester gives you the complete story but he does it in such a way that you enjoy the building excitement and though you know the outcome you keeping wondering what else he is going to throw in the fire. The power behind Winchester's stories are the people which he describes convincingly and with enough character to either root for the good guys are turn thumbs down to the bad guys. And whether you want to or not you know a lot more about the science of earthquakes after reading this book.
    • 3/5
      Another entertaining, highly informative book from Simon Winchester. He begins by musing about a small town in Ohio, the hometown of astronaut Neil Armstrong and the sea change to geology that resulted from his walk on the moon, the development of the theory of plate tectonics. He then goes on to give a chatty account of the history of geology and California, all the while veering off into fascinating and humorous side stories about people and places, as he winds his way towards April 18, 1906 and the destructive earthquake that devastated San Francisco.
    • 4/5
      What ages would I recommend it too? – Twelve and up.

      Length? – Three or Four evening read.

      Characters? – Many historical characters

      Setting? – Globally, focuses mostly on California and how geology influences lives and politics.

      Written approximately? – 2006.

      Does the story leave questions in the readers mind? – How have those influences changed since the 1906 quake. Has the politics improved, or is the town just as likely to be severely damaged by earthquake and fire today.

      Any issues the author (or a more recent publisher) should cover? No.

      Short storyline: The author discusses their travels through the country to see other geological features, and focuses primarily on the history of California and the political intrigue inherent before, and during the quake.

      Notes for the reader: There are a lot of unfamiliar words. have your dictionary ready. Actually, most of them are unnecessary adjectives, so you can ignore them. He seems to be missing some historical accuracy, as he listed Columbus as the discoverer of America. Of course, you can't expect everyone to keep up with all of the latest knowledge!
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      My favorite Simon Winchester, by far. I don't know how many times I've read (and listened to) this work. Few authors could make so many loose threads into a meaningful picture. Winchester does. He makes science make sense, in a most lyrical way.
    • 4/5
      Wonderfully detailed account of the science and geology of earthquakes, specifically focusing on the 1906 SF Earthquake. Does not overly dwell on this specific quake, but rather places it in the context of history and geography. Premise of the book being the planet is an immense interconnected whole, one happening triggers another.
    • 3/5
      Winchester really only begins to write about the subject of the title of the book when he is 170 pages in to the story....which gives you a good idea about how this book pans out. Far too much technical information about earthquakes etc for my liking, so much so that it becomes a little like a text book. There is some undeniably fascinating history involved here and there but on the whole I think Winchester gets bogged down in all the research he did for the book.
    • 5/5
      I initially started listening to it, but Winchester’s sentences are so long and adorned with such long lists of adjectives, and his writing so dense with information, that I constantly found myself re-winding the CD to get the full meaning. Nevertheless, as I found the subject matter quite fascinating, I promptly got the paper version of the book and continued.This book is about much more than the title suggests. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 serves as a focal point for a treatise in Earth geology, earthquake geology, American history, history of California, urban development and many other things that are however vaguely connected to any of the above mentioned topics. It must be one of the most comprehensibly researched books on the subject, and even though it digresses for hundreds of pages, it still makes a coherent and fascinating whole.
    • 4/5
      Super interesting tie ins of history and geology, politics and personal experiences.
    • 5/5
      I grew up in San Francisco; now I'm nervous every time I go back for a visit!
    • 3/5
      What better book to read while on a trip to San Francisco than this one? A Crack in the Edge of the World tells the tale of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. The fires that started just shortly after the earthquake exacerbated the devastation the earthquake created. It took three days for the fires to be completely put out. By that time, all of Chinatown and much of San Francisco was in rubble and ashes.It's a little scary to read a book about an awful earthquake while visiting the site of the earthquake, reading expert opinion that there is a 65% probability that another terrible earthquake will hit San Francisco before 2032.
    • 5/5
      The more I read Simon Winchester, the more I want to read. His style is accessible, human, and eclectic, dealing with complicated subjects in a manner that totally draws the reader into the topic. “A Crack in the Edge of the World,” you would assume from the cover blurb and photographs, focuses on the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Yes and no. Winchester deals with a wider topic first, global plate tectonics, narrows the field to earthquakes, narrows it again to earthquakes in the United States, further to the San Andreas Fault, and then zeroes in on the ’06 quake. Along the way, fascinating and informative digressions take place, little anecdotes that not only amused me but informed me.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.
    • 4/5
      Far more interesting than I had expected. The author goes off on many tangents and that added a great deal of interest to the whole story. Also embedded is a mini course on Geology which is quite useful to understand what is going on underneath us.
    • 4/5
      This account is heavy with technical information on geology and is pretty heavy going for one not too excited.by the technical aspects of its subject. There are no footnotesor source notes but there is an extensive bibliography. The account of the earthquake in San Francisco, when the book finally gets around to telling about it, is full on interest--certainly better done than the only other book I have read on the event:, The Great Earthquake, by Phillip Frankin (read 11 Nov 2005). The discussion on the inevitability of a future cataclysmic earthquake in California makes me glad I don't live theere.
    • 2/5
      Simon Winchester’s “A Crack in the Edge of the World” is a dense tome combining Winchester’s twin loves of travel and geology. Half travelogue and half plate tectonics lesson, Winchester delves deep into the history and formation of the American continent and how San Francisco came to be settled on uniquely unstable ground. Unfortunately, the author’s breadth of scope and lack of succinctness result in an overly long book that can’t stay focused. “Crack” is only about half-concerned with the great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. “The savage interruption” does not take place until page 243, more than sixty percent of the way through the book, not including the appendix, bibliography, and other ancillary pieces. Rather, much time and many pages are spent on a variety of topics including, among others, the literal and figurative creation of the American West, San Francisco’s rise to prominence as the cultural and social center of the west coast, and the author’s travels across the North American plate to various geologically sensitive areas including New Madrid, Missouri, home to the most powerful North American earthquakes east of California. While most of these topics would be interesting reads on their own (particular Winchester’s discussion of the North American plate’s relatively calm eastern edge in Iceland compared with its infamous western edge at the San Andreas Fault), putting them all together creates a jumbled story that, while interesting in pieces, serves little other than to perpetually delay the main course.Once the sleeping giant awakes, Winchester fails to do the one thing his books are often famous for: creating interesting characters. In his previous works, Winchester has had no trouble finding interesting people in even the most mundane of situations, whether it’s an insane murderer and the Oxford professor who created the preeminent work on the English language (“The Professor and the Madmen”), a nudist Oxford science professor who fell in love with his Chinese graduate student and then her country (“The Man Who Loved China”), or the man who invented the modern science of geology but ultimately found himself penniless and imprisoned when his fellow scientists stole his work (“The Map that Changed the World”). Here, though, the most colorful character is Enrico Caruso, the world-renowned Italian tenor who, among other Metropolitan Opera performers, put on a stirring showing of Carmen the night before the earthquake, was shaken out of a drunken stupor in the morning, and then made his way out of the city as quickly as he could. Normally so skilled at world and character building, Winchester’s failure here robs his narrative of the color and import it should otherwise deserve.This isn’t a bad book. The narrative of the earthquake and its aftermath, once Winchester gets there, is respectable, but the meandering road he takes before arriving is aggravating while his failure to provide us with characters to care about or invest in deprives the narrative of urgency. Ultimately “A Crack in the Edge of the World” is decent popular history, but it doesn’t stand up to the other work of Winchester’s oeuvre.
    • 3/5
      This is a reasonably interesting book about the San Francisco Earthquake and the fires that followed. It starts out very strongly, with some really engaging writing. But after a while it seems to lose steam. I found it to be a lot less interesting and very difficult to maintain enthusiasm after the quake itself. Where Krakatoa made good parallels to the modern world regularly, which seems a stretch on its face, this book should have had an easier time with that but fell down.

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    A Crack in the Edge of the World - Simon Winchester

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