1906: A Novel [Hardcover]

James Dalessandro (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 8, 2004

Every disaster has a backstory, none more thrilling than this one. Set during the great San Francisco earthquake and fire, this page-turning tale of political corruption, vendettas, romance, rescue—and murder—is based on recently uncovered facts that forever change our understanding of what really happened. Told by a feisty young reporter, Annalisa Passarelli, the novel paints a vivid picture of the Victorian-era city, from the mansions of Nob Hill to the underbelly of the Barbary Coast to the arrival of tenor Enrico Caruso and the Metropolitan Opera. Central to the story is the ongoing battle—fought even as the city burns—that pits incompetent and unscrupulous politicians against a coalition of honest police officers, newspaper editors, citizens, and a lone federal prosecutor. With the appeal and texture of The Alienist, Carter Beats the Devil, and the novels of E. L. Doctrow, James Dalessandro weaves unforgettable characters and actual events into a compelling epic. Movie rights to the novel have been bought by Barry Levinson/SpringCreek Productions/Warner Brothers. The movie will enter pre-production soon.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Screenwriter and novelist Dalessandro (Bohemian Heart) pens an imaginative and dense interplay between fact and fiction in this story of corruption, crime lords and the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Annalisa Passarelli, the Evening Bulletin's music critic, narrates the tale with a mix of first-person intimacy and cool omniscience. She's secretly helping the chief of detectives, Byron Fallon, gather dirt on a corrupt political syndicate headed by Adam Rolf, city attorney and power broker. Rolf (a fictional character) owns the "puppet-mayor," Eugene Schmitz (an actual person), and is supported by an army of goons and waterfront toughs led by the infamous Shanghai Kelly, who, as Dalessandro notes in his afterword, was actually dead by 1906. Byron aims to arrest the mayor, the police chief and the city attorney in one fell swoop, but when he is killed investigating a murder at the waterfront, it's up to his son Hunter, a Stanford graduate and fledgling police detective, to carry his mantle. Annalisa and Hunter appeal to an association of honest cops known as the Brotherhood (co-led by Hunter's brother, Christian), who are dedicated to destroying Rolf's machine, although Hunter also has personal vengeance on his mind. They secure incriminating evidence, but before justice can be served, the earthquake strikes, plunging the city into chaos. This plot—and all its subplots, one starring a beautiful Kansas runaway, another featuring tenor Enrico Caruso—might have worked beautifully, but Dalessandro employs too many B-movie theatrics, and the love story falls flat. Still, there's plenty of suspense to keep readers turning pages to the bittersweet conclusion.
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Review

"A bold, sweeping novel that's a richly textured, engrossing, and extraordinary tale." --Vincent Bugliosi, author of Helter Skelter --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 364 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books (April 8, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811843130
• ISBN-13: 978-0811843133
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (107 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #450,357 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars About Time, June 10, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: 1906: A Novel (Hardcover)

I am probably in a small minority of people who knew much of this story before I read it. I am 71 years old and my mother, her parents and many of their friends survived the horrible 1906 earthquake and fires. Growing up, I heard countless stories about what happened. Everyone who survived was angry that the death toll was so low, 500 people, when it was many times that number. My grandmother collected newspaper articles that disputed the death toll and many other lies that city officials told. My grandparents told of people being driven out of their homes at bayonet point when the fire was still a long way away and told they could take nothing of their possessions with them. Every survivor told tales of the military and national guard breaking into bars and liquor stores, then shooting anyone they thought might be looting. What surprised and delighted me about this book was not just the fact that the writer corrected the falsehoods, but that he took the time to tell us what life was like in one of the most beautiful and colorful cities America has ever seen. This was like a journey through my family history. He told how everyone, even the poorest, dressed well whenever they were in public. I could hear the cable cars clanging up and down the hills, the horses hooves clomping on the streets, see into the alleys of Chinatown where they were still selling poor little girls like cattle. I loved his descriptions of the mansions on Nob Hill and the dregs of the Barbary Coast, and my grandmother, were she still alive, would have relished the Caruso sections, as she had tickets to attend one of the perfromances, one that she saved up for for weeks but missed because the opera house was burned down. I think anyone would love this book, whether or not they have ever been to San Francisco. I have asked myself for many years why somone has not told this story. I am from the generation that was rasied on books, not television. This is one I am going to treasure. I heard the author speak and saw a documentary film he presented at a library last week. He is as passionate and knowledgeable about the subject in person. The images of the city and the disaster brought back a flood of emotions, as did the book. I just thought it was all wonderful.

40 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Read it now, then wait for the film version, September 23, 2004

By 

Douglas A. Greenberg (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: 1906: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is an absorbing novel that is commendable in some important respects, especially the fact that Dalessandro did some homework regarding many of the particulars of the actual story surrounding the 1906 quake and its aftermath. Overall, however, it's basically a made-for-Hollywood treatment of the earthquake that exudes sensationalism and is uneven in its historical accuracy.

Dalessandro includes much of the material unearthed (so to speak) by Gladys Hansen and other researchers regarding what actually happened on April 18, 1906. He reveals the actual casualty levels (several thousand deaths, at least), makes abundantly clear the stupidity of General Frederick Funston's overuse of dynamite as a means for creating a fire break, and spotlights the overt corruption that helped create the institutional context for a disaster that turned out much worse than it might have had the city been better prepared.

The author is at his best when he slips into his narrative this or that little historical anecdote or snippet about "old San Francisco." It's with regard to the minutiae of the pre-earthquake city, its politics and its cultural distinctiveness that the book clearly shows considerable research and preparation.

However, it's pretty clear that geology is not Dalessandro's forte, and the book includes a number of painful inaccuracies that will cause anyone familiar with the science of seismology to wince. He conveys his geological information and insight through the inclusion of a character named Jeremy Darling, an assistant professor of geology at UC Berkeley. On the train heading west, Darling explains to buxon Kansas runaway Kaitlin Staley that seismology studies "the subterranean movements of the earth's giant plates." Problem is, no one in that field would have explained earthquakes in terms of "plates" in 1906, as plate tectonic theory was not yet even a twinkle in any geologist's eye.

Later in the book, Professor Darling notices ominious precursors to a possible earthquake in the form of apparent "creep" along the San Andreas Fault. He explains to protagonist and narrator Annalisa Passareli that such highly visible creep indicates that something "big" is about to happen, perhaps to the north (i.e., in San Francisco). However, in reality, fault creep has no particular predictive value and, in fact, geologists are generally more concerned about "locked" sections of a fault where no apparent movement at all is occurring.

Finally, Dalessandro includes a strange passage in which a section of railroad being built up the Peninsula through the San Mateo County salt marshes is seen to have been twisted in an s-shape, indicating yet more dramatically the fault movement that foreshadows a possible huge break. However, if there were such twisting of railroad tracks, it would have to occur directly across the fault itself, in response to the strike-slip movement of the plates. The San Mateo marshes lie well to the east of the San Andreas Fault and west of the Hayward Fault, so what possible geological mechanism would cause them to twist into an s-shape?

I suppose only geological nitpickers will care about these kinds of inaccuracies, but it reveals a level of inattention to detail in the preparation of the book that I find annoying.

As for the presentation, Dalessandro includes some admirably colorful descriptive language and he keeps the story moving along in lively fashion, but he creates confusion by switching, often clumsily, back and forth between third person and first person narrative (the "I" being Annalise Passarelli). At the end of the book he explains that this was, apparently, the style used by the famous reporter Nellie Bly, This merely shows, however, that the mistakes of one writer can all too easily become an excuse for the mistakes of another.

As for the story itself, well, there are gunfights and fist fights and fallen women and Shanghai-ers and Enrico Caruso, and lots of descriptions of broken buildings, injured people, and the ever-spreading Great Fire. And the book's good guys are extremely good and the bad guys are REALLY bad. Hey, the hero and the heroine fall in love and get married! Indeed, there is no lack of action, and let's face it, the 1906 quake makes a terrific vehicle for a story.

If this is the kind of story you enjoy, this book is for you. Overall, I confess that despite its flaws I enjoyed it. It'll make a terrific movie (made for TV, probably), and I definitely won't miss it.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Correction from the Author., January 17, 2010

By 

James Dalessandro "rimbaud40" (San Rafael, Ca United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: 1906: A Novel (Paperback)

No writer, unless delusional, expects unanimous praise. But when you question someone's scholarship, perhaps some research of one's own is in order. I wrote 1906 partially to help refute three glaring lies. First, that the death toll was only 478, when it is easily over 4,000. Secondly that Mayor Eugene Schmitz and General Frederick Funston were the "heros" of the disaster, when their main achievments were shooting scores of innocent people as suspected looters and using dynamite to spread the conflagration that consumed 29,000 buildings. The only commentary that bothers me is that of Douglas A. Greeberg, who states that my geological "inaccuracies" - voiced by my fictional Berkely professor Jeremy Darling - cause knowledgable people to "wince" as the theory of plate tectonics was not a "twinkle in the eye" of geologists for another fifty years. Mr. Greenberg has perpetraded the broad inacurracy - my third goal in refuting - that geological science was non-existent and San Francisco was oblivious to its danger. That is woefully incorrect. According to UC San Diego professor Naomi Orestes, in her 1999 book Rejection of Continental Drift (Introduction, Page 3) ... "Imagine my surpise - and dismay - to discover in England that the radically new idea of plate tectonics had been proposed more than a half century before (in his 1912 book) by German geophysicist, Alfred Wegner...Wegner's book, The Origin of Continents and Oceans...contains many of the essential features of plate tectonic theory." And Edward S. Holden, Director of the Lick Observatory, wrote in 1898 that earthquakes were casued by "faulting in the underground strata." In 1905, a San Francisco newspaper reported that "College professors call them geotectonic" (Fradkin: pg. 25, The Great Earthquake and Firestorm of 1906). As for fictional professor Darling's belief that something "big" was imminent, between 1837 and 1906, San Francisco recorded 16 earthquakes of nearly 6.0 or greater, including a 5.9 in 1902, two 6.1's in 1903, two more in 1904. Mr Greenberg argues that when Professor Darling observes the 'creep' of a fence that straddles the San Andreas Fault, "fault creep has no particular predictive value and, in fact, geologists are generally more concerned about "locked" sections of a fault where no apparent movement at all is occurring." Its obvious that Mr. Greenberg, and not this author, failed his geology studies. Although the San Andreas fault is "locked" at its edges, houses and fences on opposites sides are moving past each other an average of 1.5 inches a year, caused by the horrific bending and buckling of land adjacent to the locked fault. This causes earthquakes when the opposing plates can no longer take the stress and rebound past each other. In 1906, the average 'rebound' was 13-15 feet. Bad news: the North American and Pacific Plates have slipped 160 inches since 1906: we are now at a similar level of stress. This is a core factor in the "predictive" statements of the USGS for an imminent reoccurence. As for Mr. Greenberg's contention that my character Hunter Fallon could not attribute the 'S' curve in a rail road track to the San Andreas Fault, there is a simple solution: my character got that one wrong. I hate historical epics that use hind sight to get everything correct: my characters used the science of the day. What Hunter observed was equally incipient: the instability of land fill. But there is one last, off-handed insult, cast by Mr. Greenberg at the journalist Nellie Bly, whose style is emulated by my narrator, Anna Lisa Passarelli when she put herself into her stories, switching from third to first person narrative. Mr. Greenberg states..."This merely shows, however, that the mistakes of one writer can all too easily become an excuse for the mistakes of another." Nellie Bly is one of the most influential journalists in American history: she spent 10 days as an inmate in a New York asylum to expose the abuse of the mentally ill, posed as a pregnant runaway to break up a baby peddling ring, and then a forced prostitution ring involving New York police officers. In 1890, she traveled around the world, alone, in less than 80 days, electrifying the nation. She became the first female war correspondent, reporting the horrors of The Great War. Her style of 'first person' jorunalism was emulated by Jack London in "John Barleycorn" and became a staple of writers like Hunter S. Thompson. To call her life and career a "mistake" is reckless and inexcusable. I expect all writers to do their homework: I expect their critics to do the same. James Dalessando, San Francisco