John Freeman

When the Big One occurs, San Franciscans won't be able to say they didn't expect it. After all, California's City by the Bay already had its trial run, and it was a thorough dress rehearsal. At 5:12am on April 18, 1906, the San Andreas Fault, which runs 800 miles down the California coast, ruptured in Northern California.

The earthquake--which registered an estimated 7.8 on the Richter scale--was indeed the Hurricane Katrina of its day, destroying property, setting off fires that claimed somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand lives and radically restructuring the city's economy. In his latest book, "A Crack in the Edge of the World," Simon Winchester describes in detail--with maps, charts and descriptions of his own journeys crisscrossing North America--what it taught us about geology. According to Winchester, the quake did more than displace 200,000 Californians. It also kick-started an intense examination of the Earth itself, leading in the early 1960s to plate tectonics, the study of how parts of the Earth's outer crusts grind up against each other to create mountains, volcanoes and, of course, earthquakes.

Readers who devoured John McPhee's 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning "Annals of the Former World" might find the book too heavy on Geology 101, but it's hard to resist. Like McPhee, Winchester is a fine prose stylist, and his language ripples like the hills of Northern California. It's also a testament to his skill as an explanatory journalist that by the time we reach the quake itself, buried some 250 pages into the book, the event appears not as some act of God--as it did to people then--but as a foregone conclusion for a planet destined for constant and often devastating upheaval.

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

By Simon Winchester

HarperCollins, 462 pages, $27.95

(2005-10-18)

Also by John Freeman

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Long before Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, the worst natural disaster to befall the South didn't come from Mother Nature but man himself. Or to be exact: one man's army
(2005-10-11)

Nonfiction Review
Ever since he made his debut in 1952 with "Player Piano," a novel about people on a fictional planet controlled by a computer called EPICAC, Kurt Vonnegut has resurfaced every few years to remind us--in fiction or in memoirs--that technology should not be trusted
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Nonfiction Review
Now that the first wave of reporter memoirs has reached bookstores, a second perhaps more powerful wave of accounts from actual soldiers in Iraq has crested on the horizon. The best of the lot by far is John Crawford's "The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell."
(2005-08-23)

About Face
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Fiction Review
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Superhero
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What I'm reading this summer
(2005-06-09)

Nonfiction Review
(2005-05-31)

Family Guy
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Nonfiction Review
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