San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires [Audiobook, CD, Unabridged] [Audio CD]

Dennis Smith (Author), Alan Sklar (Narrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 22, 2005

At 5:12 a.m. on the morning of April 18, 1906, San Francisco was struck by one of the worst earthquakes in history, instantly killing hundreds. The ensuing fires that ravaged the city for days were responsible for the deaths of as many as 3,000 more. In all, 522 blocks and 28,188 buildings were leveled, and some 200,000 people dislocated.This watershed event in American history has never before been told with the richness of historical detail and insight that our foremost historian of fire, Dennis Smith, brings to it in San Francisco Is Burning. Smith cinematically recounts this terrible tragedy through the stories of the people who lived through those terrible days-from a valiant naval officer who helped save the city's piers and wharves to Eugene Schmitz, the crooked mayor, to the "debonair scoundrel" Abe Ruef, the most erudite city boss in American history. Throughout, Smith reveals many unknown details about the event, from the city's great vulnerability to fire-due to its corrupt and hasty building practices-to the widespread racism the quake unleashed and the atrocities committed by national guardsmen. Told with verve and a seasoned firefighter's knowledge, San Francisco Is Burning is the gripping and definitive account of one of the greatest disasters of the twentieth century.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Firefighter turned author Smith (Report from Ground Zero) performs an exhausting autopsy on the temblor and subsequent fire that devastated San Francisco 100 years ago. With 92 chapters, the narrative effect is one of a nervous cameraman trying to take in everything (the chapter on Enrico Caruso jumping from his bed at the Palace Hotel is one paragraph long) and managing to make a distant event seem even more remote. The author takes aim at the procedures of the official response and the chain of command, considers whether the army did more than the navy and presents "what-if" scenarios that will appeal most to students of how to manage a natural disaster. An "especially cruel irony" was the fact that saloons were ordered closed on the day of the fire, yet there, in bottles, jugs and kegs, "was undoubtedly enough wine to extinguish the early fires." Smith too often pauses to backfill the careers and family histories of various personalities or discuss the tectonics of earthquakes. His firefighter's-eye-view of the disaster will have a tough time competing with Simon Winchester's terrific A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, due out in October. (Sept. 26)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Smith has captured the horror and chaos of those first terrifying hours, and ensuing anger and grief and determination."

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Tantor Media; Unabridged,Library - Unabridged CD edition (September 22, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400131790
• ISBN-13: 978-1400131792
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,720,068 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars MARVELOUS AND ASTUTE, November 4, 2005

By 

James Dalessandro "rimbaud40" (San Rafael, Ca United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires (Hardcover)

It might be highly unusual for a supposed "competitor" to review the work of a contemporary, but seeing that only one person on Amazon has bothered to review Dennis Smith's compelling new book, "San Francisco Burning," I thought it incumbent to offer praise where it is richly deserved. For that past three decades -- ever since the first defintive text, Thomas/Witt's "The San Francisco Earthquake" and Gladys Hansen's unparalleled "Denial of Disaster" first appeared -- every writer on the subject of the great earthquake and fire has claimed to have the "untold" story and discovered some "breakthrough" evidence. It hasn't happened. But what Dennis Smith has achieved here is remarkable for its insight and observation. More than any other book, perhaps, Smith has identified the true heroes and villains of the 1906 earthquake. There were actually two disasters: nature's earthquake and humankind's raging inferno. Smith, a former N.Y. firefighter who wrote the marvelous "Report from Ground Zero", takes a street-level, in-the-trenches view of what occured. He adroitly argues that the true hero was Lt. Frederick Freeman of the U.S. Navy, who led a hundred sailors on Navy Tugboats in a desperate, three day struggle to save the waterfront and the trains station, the two locations which evacuated 300,000 people in just 72 hours. Smith puts the final dagger into the two former sacred cows of the disaster: the monstrously corrupt and incompetent Mayor Eugene Schmitz, and the almost pathologically intractable Brig. General Frederic Funston. While the Navy devoted itself to aiding the fire fight, Mayor Schmitz thought it more important to protect property -- property about to burn -- and issued a "Shoot To Kill" order to thousands of soldiers, National Guardsmen, and "Special Police" who were merely vigilantes. Schmitz and Funston's idea of protecting order and property was to shoot scores of citizens "suspected" of commiting any kind of crime, including several people carrying their own goods or attempting to aid the wounded, and using dynamite to try to blast fire breaks on wood frame buildings. The blasting -- 90% of which, according to Smith, was done with highly flammable granulated dynamite, black powder and gun cotton -- started hundreds of fires and destroyed sections of the city that would have likely escaped the conflagration. Smith's book is not perfect: the main criticism is that when he gets a full head of steam and is building marvelous dramatic momentum, he stops to give us history and biography lessons. This is especially glaring when, during a powerful dissertation on the events of Wed., April 18, he jumps ahead to tell us what happens to city officials much later, deflating his own momentum. Re-engaging that level of drama is not easy. Some wise editing could have made this book shine even more brightly. But Smith's powerful and fearless analysis, that the Navy achieved brilliantly and the Army -- in the issues that mattered most -- failed miserably, lends testimony to the inviolable concept that one man, one leader, can make a difference. And in his greatest analysis, Smith perceives what others of us have long shared: that it was the brilliant, visionary fire chief, Dennis Sullivan, the man who had fought the thieves at City Hall to spend money on fire prevention, the man who had a plan that might have saved many lives and much property, the man whose loss was the most catastrophic event after the earthquake itself. Sullivan would never have let fools spread the fire with the improper use of dynamite. Dennis Sullivan, a hydraulic engineer, would have concentrated on tapping every avaialbe source of water, and directing citizens, soldiers, sailors and marines into combatting the fire, with law & order left in the hands of police. Anyone who has ever vigorously studied Dennis Sullivan realizes that he, more than anyone, was prepared for that moment. Bravo, Dennis Smith: your book is the best written in the last 15 years on this subject, and your conclusions and scholarship are superb. You have joined a very small, select group who truly understands what happened in that awful week in April of 1906. James Dalessandro, author, 1906: A Novel.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I loved it, December 14, 2005

By 

BookAddict44 "BookAddict44" (Chicao) - See all my reviews

This review is from: San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires (Hardcover)

I just posted a review of Simon Winchester's "Crack In The Earth", which took me weeks to plow through, and came here to offer my comments on Dennis Smith's book. This is the vastly superior effort, one that really focuses on the disaster, one that has the courage to rip into the men who contributed to the horrors of 1906 -- Mayor Eugene Schmitz and General Frederick Funson -- whose efforts hastened the city's demise and caused sections that might have survived to be burned. I have always been a fan of Dennis Smith's: his "Report From Ground Zero" is as engaging and harrowing as any thriller. Smith actually manages to do the impossible: he brings up events and elements of this story that no one else has. He focuses on how the United States Navy actually stopped the fire in many places, only to have the Army start the fire again with the monstrously inept use of granulated dynamite. Smith even points to a warehouse where millions of gallons of wine were stored, and pumping equipment to move the wine was available, across the street from one of the most destructive fires in the tenement section of San Francisco. This may well be the last book on the subject, every one of which I have read. I plowed through this one in two sittings, staying up into the wee hours to find out what happened next. It was a joy after the tedium of "Crack In the Earth." I just wanted to say "thanks" for closing the book on earthquake books with a "bang."

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars inspiring narrative, October 6, 2005

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires (Hardcover)

For the historically inclined, Smith manages to wonderfully recreate a San Francisco that he and we have never experienced. But through extensive research and adroit storytelling, he makes San Francisco of 1906 come alive. You can feel the chaos and terror induced by the earthquake and subsequent fires.

But the sheer vitality of the city's inhabitants shines through. Something to well remember when [not if] there is the next quake.