A Crack in the Edge of the World
Ratings7
Average rating3.6
A burgeoning new city is built on the dreams of the American gold rush. It is also built upon a landscape that has been stretching, sliding and breaking apart for millennia. In 1906 the dreams of this city came crashing down beneath the rippling wave of a horrifying earthquake that turned roads into great rippling rivers, that set buildings ablaze for days on end, that made homes collapse upon themselves. Simon Winchester�s breathtaking story delves deep beneath the surface of the earth and explains to us why the world moves as it does; and breaks apart with such devastating results. At the same time he never lets us forget the human story: what happened in this new, seemingly blessed city on the 18th April 1906. As he vividly portrays the lives of the people who suffered and survived the devastation he also tells a universal story: the hubris of man as he ignores the warnings of nature and how we respond and try to understand the world around us. Compelling, moving and enlightening, Simon Winchester brings to light the world beneath our feet and through the story of this one terrifying event one hundred years ago, begins to make sense of our world now.
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1906 a terrible year seismically - earthquakes everywhereonce the sticking point gave away, the plates moved at TWO MILES PER SECOND past each other!
scientists of the time ignored or didn't understand seismographical data (seismographs were very primitive) and mislabeled the epicenter for many years.only 3-10% of damage to buildings was actually due to the earthquake; the fire did the rest
*Pentecostal movement got an initial boost (San Francisco suffering the WRATH OF GOD for its SINFUL WAYS!) from which it has never looked back.
What better book to read while on a trip to San Francisco than this one? A Crack in the Edge of the World tells the tale of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. The fires that started just shortly after the earthquake exacerbated the devastation the earthquake created. It took three days for the fires to be completely put out. By that time, all of Chinatown and much of San Francisco was in rubble and ashes.
It's a little scary to read a book about an awful earthquake while visiting the site of the earthquake, reading expert opinion that there is a 65% probability that another terrible earthquake will hit San Francisco before 2032.
