Customer Reviews

California Fault: Looking for the Spirit of a State Along the San Andreas

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California Fault is an excellent and endearing book. Thurston Clark combines elements of geology, sociology, history with a wealth of insight to create the story of the San Andreas fault and the Californians who live above and along it. The author provides an excellent and detailed narrative, and, despite following many entertaining digressions, keeps it all together and focussed by the creative use of different themes - the trail of an ancestor who led men across the Oregon trail, his personal search for an earthquake to experience and someone to forecast it for him, and of course, the pursuit of the California dream. In particular those who like eccentrics will find a selection of the best California has to offer - their stories tied together by the author's skillfully highlighted ironies and ambiguities which are themself such a big part of any true California story.

Clarke certainly came up with a novel way to get to grips with the fading California Dream. His trip along the San Andreas Fault is filled with characters and places no one would ever visit except Clarke. This makes it all the better as how else would we know there are plans afoot to turn a polluted inland sea, the Salton Sea (where?), in southern California into a resort! Or stories like the weirdly wonderful Japanese businessman who built a "shrine" to James Dean near the spot on the fault where Dean crashed and burned...the list goes on and on. Somehow Clarke is able to weave it all together into a coherent whole and despite his wish to experience a quake on his journey, he doesn't yet leaves us all with a story that will add to the understanding of the elusive California Dream.