The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 [AUDIOBOOK] [CD] [UNABRIDGED] (Audio CD)

by Nicholas Shrady (Author), Patrick Lawlor (Reader)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 exerted a great cultural, religious and political impact, argues Shrady (Tilt: A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa) in this revelatory volume. On November 1 (both a Sunday and All Saints' Day) at 9:30 a.m., a titanic earthquake shattered the quiet, turning the pious city's packed houses of worship into crypts as their walls collapsed. Five days of firestorms consumed the buildings left standing and a tsunami drowned the benighted survivors who escaped toward the ocean. As Shrady deftly details, Europe was stunned by the merciless destruction of one of the continent's most opulent cities. Leading intellectual and philosophical figures—Voltaire, Rousseau, Pope, Goethe and Kant, among others—became fascinated by the question of divine intervention in human affairs. Lisbon, still home to the Inquisition, had been immolated: was this evidence of God's wrath or of God's nonexistence? The latter interpretation soon found its way into Voltaire's cynical, secularist Enlightenment masterpiece, Candide. Within the decade, scholars had created the new discipline of seismology, and governments were taking their first faltering steps toward urban planning and disaster control. Shrady's account will find the same ready audience that delight not only in tales of catastrophe but in smart, stylishly written history.(Apr. 7)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist
Shrady’s vivid account of the mid-eighteenth-century Lisbon earthquake is exemplary popular history. The hellish events of that day in 1755 when the Portuguese capital was left in ruins—“Lisbon was . . . all but leveled”—are reconstructed with great but sober drama. The earthquake itself was followed by fires spreading throughout the city and a series of tsunamis arising from the river upon which Lisbon sat. The author embeds the narrative of this trio of natural disasters in a lively, completely approachable lesson in pre-earthquake Portuguese history, in which it is stressed that despite the wealth Portugal accumulated during its glory days as an empire builder, it remained a backward country, held in a stranglehold of religious dogma. Shrady also investigates the intellectual aftermath of the disaster all over Europe, for the cataclysm prompted widespread Enlightenment discussions about God and the natural world. --Brad Hooper --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Tantor Media; Unabridged edition (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400136407
• ISBN-13: 978-1400136407
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Disaster Like No Other, April 14, 2008

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 (Hardcover)

The earthquake that hit Lisbon on 1 November 1755 shook up a lot more than its buildings and citizens. There were repercussions for science, religion, philosophy, politics, and literature. In _The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755_ (Viking) Nicholas Shrady gives a compelling short account of the disaster itself, and the history of the events leading up to it, but spends far more of the pages in a fascinating description of the effects of the quake in local and global history. There have been bigger disasters, even in our own times, but this one was not only big, but it made gigantic differences even in the way humans looked at their place in the world. Shrady says that because of this particular disaster in a particular place, all people all over the world "from staunch clerics to enlightened philosophers were compelled to re-examine their most cherished dogmas." We are still living with some of the changes the earthquake wrought.

José I may have been king, but Portugal was largely ruled by the church which was the largest landowner and which supported the justly-feared Holy Office of the Inquisition. Every traveler noted how pious the inhabitants were, but many of them were in church when the disaster began, first with tremors, then violent waves from the sea, then from fire from all the household fireplaces that were beneath the collapsed buildings. Ten percent of the populace was wiped out. As in all disasters or diseases, there were those who knew that God was sending a message to those afflicted. The message, however, did not make sense. Lisbon was no worse than any large city, and demonstrably more pious than the others. The flawed hero of this book, the Portuguese Secretary of State, Sebastião Carvalho, realized that blaming people's sinfulness for the disaster would only undercut his efforts to bring them together to surmount it. The changes in thinking were not just religious, but more broadly philosophical. The most famous changes came in Voltaire's reaction to the ideas of Leibnitz, who reasoned that if the world was the product of a benevolent and all-powerful God, then it must be the best of all possible worlds, no matter how hard it is for us to see the goodness. In 1759, Voltaire published _Candide_, a rollicking, bawdy, fast-moving tale of inexplicable ups-and-downs, including the main characters' presence in the Lisbon earthquake. The book made fun not only of Leibnitz's philosophy, but of the Church, the Inquisition, the nobility, the military, and more. It isn't surprising that governments tried to suppress it, and also not surprising that it became a bestseller. There was no sense in trying to figure out how the world is the best possible one, the book shows; we must simply get on with the duties of our lives. It was a stylistic death-blow to deistic optimism.

It also was part of a new mood of skepticism that encouraged scientific explanations of catastrophes rather than religious explanations. Carvalho arranged for a survey to be widely distributed, to document how people perceived the earthquake and its effects, answering questions like "Did you perceive the shock to be greater from one direction than another?" or "Did the sea rise or fall first?" The undulating waves of the ground reported by many who survived may have triggered the first ideas that earthquakes spread as waves; the first theories of wave motion within the Earth were put forward by English physicist John Mitchell in 1760. The Lisbon earthquake, then, was the beginning of seismology. A new city was designed from scratch, on an enlightened rational grid that became a model for the future rebuilding of Paris. Military engineers constructed the first buildings in Europe designed to withstand earthquakes. Shrady writes that the "disaster would also usher in a new era, one in which a wholesome sense of doubt and the powers of reason would replace the certainties of religious dogma, and the numbing resignation that providence instilled would give way to the liberation of human promise." But he also reminds us that the new era is not completely arrived, for there will always be those that take sanctimonious satisfaction in the punishment God deals out to others. The retired archbishop of New Orleans, for instance, insisted that hurricane Katrina was deserved chastisement for sexual attitudes, abortions, and drug addiction. Lisbon's lessons are not yet universal.