Simon Winchester’s latest book, A
Crack in the Edge of the World, takes a comprehensive
look at the country’s worst earthquake: San Francisco, 1906.
The quake, he writes, “came thundering in on what looked like huge
undulating waves … the whole street and all its great buildings
rose and fell, rose and fell, on what looked like an enormous tidal
bore, an unstoppable tsunami of rock and brick and cement and
stone.”
But this masterfully written (if sometimes
overwritten) book goes beyond the big quake. Winchester describes
the interworkings of tectonic plates and convective currents that
underlie the entire Western United States. Yellowstone might one
day erupt after a quake in Alaska, he writes; “trauma in one place
seems to have an effect on the other.” His pre-quake history of
California and San Francisco reviews the Gold Rush and the
geological exploration of the West, and explains how San Francisco
became the principal city of the West and later lost that stature.
He discusses the rise in Los Angeles of the Pentecostalists, who
ascribed the quake to a punishing God; quake insurance coverage (or
the lack of it); and Chinese immigration. His travel writing brings
to life Mount Diablo, the Salton Sea, western Canada, Yellowstone,
and the 1906 quake towns of Parkfield and Olema.
While
A Crack in the Edge of the World is an
entertaining read, it contains a deadly serious warning about the
ongoing danger along the San Andreas Fault, which may again lay
waste to California’s coastal cities.
A
Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California
Earthquake of 1906
Simon Winchester
512 pages, softcover: $15.95.
Harper Collins, 2006.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A whole lot of shaking.
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