Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(40)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(22)
2 star:		(20)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Simon Winchester's love of learning and information is so incredibly infectious that even at his roughest his books do not fail to illuminate and interest. As with KRAKATOA, Winchester in A CRACK AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD takes a momentous geological event--in this case, the great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906--and proceed to tell us as many stories leading up to and out of it as he possibly can, covering not merely accounts of the event itself (particularly the disastrous fires that came from it) but also ways of understanding the event within its multiple contexts. He tells us much about the commerical and social history of California as well as of the geology of the San Andreas Fault, Iceland, Missouri, Indonesia... s you can see, at times it _does_ get a little much. Winchester loves to amble through all these events at his own pace, but the result is a book that often reads as if it were hardly edited. His prose leaps about with weak transitions (along the lines of "As we have seen earlier," "And this brings us to Enrico Caruso," "And this is not the first time he shall appear in these pages, as we shall see," etc.) and seems as irruptive and eruptive as the events he chronicles; his intriguing and edifying narrative would have surely benefited from more studied editing and more careful organization. There's a wonderful book buried in here, but as with some of Winchester's earlier books this seems rushed and undigested.

Simon Winchester is a storyteller and he rambles around the tale of the great earthquake of a century ago. This is not the definitive account of the 1906 quake but the account of what Mr. Winchester found to be interesting -- fortunately it is interesting for the reader too.

The book is a wonderful geology book for the non-science reader as Mr. Winchester lays out why the quake occurred where it occurred (see the maps within) with vignettes with the fallout from the quake. He also makes clear that the next San Francisco earthquake is just down the road and we are no more prepared for that one either. The book cover itself is innovative and almost worth the price of the book. For the reader desiring a more traditional history of the 1906 quake, see Dan Kurzman's "Disaster: The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906" (2001).

This book by Simon Winchester has many good stories and contains as lot of useful information on earthquakes, geology and geography. It also contains a lot of good material that brings the period before, during and after the 1906 earthquake to life. However, this title also has a number of drawbacks that prevents it from being a great book.

Some of the issues for me were:
-- The title doesn't quite match the contents. The book is less focused than the title suggests.
-- I think more time should have been spent on deciding what to keep and what to cut. There is a lot of unnecessary detail and I wonder if the author forgot about the audience he had in mind as well as the main subject.
-- Sometimes the book is too rambling and the digressions are not interesting to many audiences, although extremely interesting to some. Should there have really been two even better books created from this material?

I'm not saying this book isn't worth reading. However, it's important to know what you are getting. If you want a concise and specific book on the SF earthquake alone, this is NOT it! If you want to know more about earthquakes in general and also understand more about the SF earthquake of 1906 then this might be great for you. In short, it is a more technical treatment than the title suggests and although it has a lot of good stories, they are not gathered into a cohesive well-organized whole.

I think this guy is one of the better nonfiction writers out there now. His "The Professor and the Madman" and "Krakatoa" and "The Map that Changed the World" are all fantastically entertaining and informative reads. "Crack," however, is his worst outing that I've read . . . It's a sprawling, chatty work that covers vast quantities of information in that peculiar voice that says "I'm really successful and can override my editors now."

The bad: There are really glaring factual errors (Alaska is a bit bigger than 600,000 acres). There are doubled-up currency markers like "$60 million dollars." These annoy the editor in me; someone should have caught them, and that nobody did underlines the lack of editorial care that has gone into the work as a whole. He intersperses his own road-trip memoirs far too liberally among the episodes detailing the 1906 earthquake that shook San Francisco to the ground.

The good: That said, the information he brings together is fascinating stuff. As a history of San Francisco (or of early California, really) this book, faults and all, is well worth the read. It was a wild city--the most important on the West Coast, until the aftermath of the quake sent business and population south to Los Angeles--and Winchester's work paints vivid pictures of the people and development trends that made it what it was.

I recommend this book, but I recommend that you read some of his other works too, to see what he's really capable of.

The book starts VERY slow. The first hundred pages rate only 1- or 2-stars. Twice I seriously considered putting it down not to pick it up again, but I plodded through and I'm glad I did.

If you can make it past the first hundred pages, the rest of the book improves considerably, though much of it relates only peripherally to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (you're halfway through the book before the earthquake takes place). That is good at times, as it gives the reader a fuller understanding of the context in which the quake ocurred, as well as the underlying causes of it and the resultant destruction.

The reader will get a basic understanding of "Plate Tectonics," and the way the various plates interact in the California area (as well as other parts of the world). The author is obviously one who loves his area of study.

Yes, the author is pretentious and arrogant at times, and he seems to display a bias against Bible-believing Christians. Keeping that in mind, it was a book worth reading.

This is certainly an entertaining book and subject matter, and Winchester is erudite and at times can tell a compelling story. The problem is that his rambling digressions detract from a great story. The story is what caused the 1906 earthquake, how people experienced the tragedy, and what happened as a result. But Winchester gets sidetracked from this story with long autobiographical accounts of how he drove across the country and what happened to him in Iceland in 1967.

Also, Winchester is a bit too clever for his own good. For example, he tells an interesting account of how the earthquake spurred on the Pentecostal movement. But then he traces all this to the evangelical right wing and dwells on the irony of how the earthquake and its timing changed American history. But religious fundamentalism and revivalism have been a part of American history for centuries; the argument just doesn't hold water.

In the end, the book is worthwhile, and Winchester makes his points. His most interesting point is how Los Angeles supplanted San Francisco as the dominant West Coast city as a direct result of the earthquake and the city boosters attempt to spin the earthquake by blaming all the loss on the ensuing fire. Also interesting, and chilling, is analysis of the 1989 earthquake showing that it really did not release any of the tension built up in the section of the fault we're most worried about.

And another example of a point well made is Winchester's criticisms of the failure to San Francisco after the earthquake to re-think the architecture and vision of the city and to take advantage of the blank slate that the tragedy created (like Chicago did after the great fire and, arguably, like Berlin has done in rebuilding itself as a great capitol city). The boosters were too busy spinning the tragedy and getting things up and running right away. It looks like the same thing is going to happen with lower Manhattan, where Liebskind's initial brilliant vision keeps get re-written and sacrificed to shorter term interests.

The book would have been much better with a re-write that focuses more on the story at hand and less on the digressions.

Geography was not my favorite subject in school - but it might have been if Simon Winchester had been teaching it. Winchester takes us on a trip through the aeons of time - and on his own trip across the North American plate - with humor and style. I could not put it down, promising myself that I would just finish one more chapter and winding up burning the midnight oil instead. It is amazing to note how many Americans are still living in an area that could kill without warning, yet ignore the danger. Plus, so much is relevant and a relevation in the wake of Katrina's devastation - a quicker response in 1906 than now? wrangling with insurance companies? Do we never learn? A fascinating read - highly recommended.

With all the recent attention to natural disasters, the following book caught my eye... A Crack In The Edge Of The World: America And The Great California Earthquake Of 1906 by Simon Winchester. I'm not quite sure what I was expecting or looking for, but this certainly wasn't it...

In this book, Winchester tells the story of the 1906 earthquake and how it affected the city and the people who lived there. For that, it's not bad. My problem is that we don't really get to the earthquake until page 244. To arrive at that point, we take a number of side trips... A history of geology, plate movements, scientific study of ground movement, the author's travels to look at all the different areas where plate movements are visible, the Madaras fault in middle America, personalities that led to the settlement of California, the ethnic and racial inequality that existed in San Francisco towards the Chinese, etc. Oh, and *plenty* of foreshadowing to the "big event"... Put together in a single volume, I felt like I was being fed a random, unfocused plate of rabbit trails that served only to showcase the author's ability to write flowery prose and use Latin phrases. And footnotes... Every other page had footnotes... sometimes two per page. While I'm not "anti-footnote", it became irritatingly comical to have to jump up and down on nearly every page to read the book.

If you can get past the writing style, there are some interesting issues. I was completely unaware of the prejudice towards Chinese at that time. It sounded dangerously close to some of the situations we find ourselves in today. The attempts to "spin" the event to minimize the damage (and thus maximize the economic impact of future development and commerce) is also strangely reminiscent of today's media and commercial messages. It's those all-too-infrequent gems in this book that keep me from giving this a less-than-average rating...

As with all reviews, my opinions may not be your opinions, and your mileage may vary. All I can say is that this book contained about a quarter of what I expected by the title, and knowing then what I know now would probably have caused me to leave this book on the library shelf...

High expectations were set for this work, when I heard Simon Winchester speak on the topic. If he was half as witty and erudite on the page as in person, the book was sure to be a hit.
It turns out he's not. The book is still a hit, though.

Winchester displays here a slooooowly meandering style: one keeps expecting him to come back around and address the point he seemed to be raising at the start of a chapter, then waits for him to get there in, say, the resulting arc which carries through the next several chapters, then hopes the next tangent might somehow find a way back toward the main thesis. This expectation is left unsatisfied. Instead the careful reader, when searching for a theme, finds instead diverse wildly flung declaratives, each contradicting the next and all generally based on (acknowledged, and highly suspect) hearsay. These interstitial outbursts are a big distraction from the chapter-long snippets of neat historiography, and the longer passages of what might have been neat historiography if he could maintain a style and voice.

While the florid biographical asides are often laugh-out-loud amusing, they are always written in a style that rings purple beside the dusty grey majority of the text. The facts are vital enough, the processes dynamic, and the events cataclysmic, yet his pace makes it boring. Novices will have a much better time with Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. So, for that matter, will experts.

I am baffled at every turn that this work is not more consistent, as it is based on secondary research. It seems he's cobbled together opinions as he went along, then stacked it all together in a stream-of-lectureness fashion and forgot to skim the text to make sure the pieces matched. That his statements are inflammatory and in flagrant disregard of *the very facts presented* makes them all the more irritating.

In a speech "honoring" the anniversary of the quake (and taken direclty from the book) Winchester ridiculed San Franciscans for bothering to exist. His words are Hastert-esque, especially in the context of hyper-cross-promoting of his upcoming documentary film. One wonders what Chrissie Martinstein would say, if they were to meet at Lotta's Fountain. One hopes that Mr. Winchester would withhold half-cocked opinions of the fact of her survival and consequent century of thriving - or else that he wears a protective cup.

There comes a point in a writer's life when he can dash off anything and stature alone demands his legion of fans trot out the trumpets. Winchester's "The Professor and the Madman" was a fine book, and Krakatoa had its strong points, despite 100 pages of tedious geology. The N.Y Times reviewer of Crack In the Earth stated (paraphrasing) that he hated this book so much that he wanted to kick it across his back yard, suggesting it was written by Austin Powers. The same N.Y. Times which annointed Winchester for his previous books. Let us be clear on one thing: this book is not about the great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. It is about Simon Winchester's adventures with rocks, from one end of the Pacific Rim to another, with a section on the great earthquake. It takes him 200 meandering, self-indulgent pages to get to San Francisco, at which point he rehashes every known detail of the city on the cusp of disaster, with none of the passion or cohesion of previous authors. Fifty pages later, he finally addresses the earthquake, again in vignettes both disjointed and mind numbing. And what evidence, other than the author's assertions, is there that this catastrophe led to the rise of the Pentecostal movement, and just who was anxiously awaiting that clarification? I have read virtually every book on the 1906 tragedy since I was a college student in the Bay Area in the '70's. There are many fine books on the San Francisco Earthquake, but because of his stature, many will see only Winchester's feeble tome. Gordon Thomas' and Max Witt's "The San Francisco Earthquake" was the first to challenge the long-standing assertions about the allegedly brave mayor, Eugene Schmitz, and the activities of the military during those terrible days, and is a marvelous, compelling read. Gladys Hansen's "Denial of Disaster" stands alone for its research, insight, and extraordinary photographs. For sheer drama and historical recreation of San Francisco, and for an unforgettable collection of characters, my wife and I are still touting James Dalessandro's remarkable novel, 1906, to our friends. And lost in the juggernaut of Winchester's p.r. barrage is a book that really rips into the human folly that resulted in the burning and loss of 30,000 buildings, Dennis Smith's "San Francisco Burning", which, unlike Winchester's book, is actually about San Francisco and the disaster. My hope is that people will find their way to some of the books that really tell this extraordinary story. I came to Crack In The Earth with an open mind, hopeful that Winchester would focus on the disaster and add to our knowledge and understanding. I had to repeatedly force myself to plow through it, hoping it would improve. It never did. The subject deserves a much better effort than this.