A crack in the edge of the world: America and the great California earthquake of 1906

In a book that combines personal observations, travelogue and history, Winchester succeeds at being dull in all three. His is the only voice, and the quality of the insights from this globe-trotting correspondent underwhelm the reader. Even in catastrophe, Winchester cannot conjure any hint of

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human drama. What he does conjure is his own astonishment at the painfully mundane—driving east to west, Tennessee seems to go on for a long time; there are four families named Angel in the town of Paradise, KS; there is a seismograph in a general store in a small town in Oklahoma; both the fabulously wealthy and the wretched poor lived in San Francisco in the early 20th century; some people think that the earthquake (which was felt far away) began at 12 minutes after 5am, others insist it began 7 minutes after the hour. Wow.

“The only way one can make any attempt at rationally planning for earthquakes in places like this, where, generally speaking, earthquakes do not happen, is to look very closely at those places where they have, albeit very infrequently, taken place. By doing this, one has a faint hope of imagining what could take place at some infuriatingly unspecifiable time in the future: It is only by looking at what has occurred in years gone by that one can imagine what might yet occur.”

Blithering Idiot Barleywine
Mendocino Oktoberfest

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Winchester's account of the San Francisco's earthquake is quite good, when he finally comes to the point of telling its story. Unfortunately, to reach it, one has to endure Winchester's meandering across the globe or more precisely the American plate. I found Winchester's constant reference to the

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"modern" revolution of plate tectonics quite strange. To me, the 1960s sound ancient not modern. Plate tectonics is part of every school book and common knowledge to all but old fossils. Winchester's drama thus comes at least thirty years too late. I would have preferred a shorter, leaner account that put San Francisco and the catastrophe at its center. One of Winchester's weaker titles.

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This is a topic that I'm really interested in, but I couldn't get past Winchester's obnoxious, overblown writing style. He's so focused on creating an impressive dramatic lead-up to his story that he obscures his actual point to a ridiculous extent. At the beginning of the book, he goes on and on

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about a dramatic recent revolution in geology, dragging it out for pages and pages before actually telling us what he's talking about.

"[G]eology has suddenly and seriously changed, and at a pace so rapid as to bewilder and astonish all who come up against it anew, or return to it after a long while away. It is probably fair to say that never before has any long-existing science been remodeled and reworked so profoundly, so suddenly, and in so short a time. Wholly unimagined visions and possibilities allow us to contemplate our planet in brand-new ways." Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I have zero interest in reading paragraph upon paragraph that contains zero actual content.

"Thanks to the new attitudes and instruments and scientific philosophies of the new science, all the events of great geographical moment... can now be seen and interpreted in an entirely fresh context, and in a manner that had rarely before occurred to those who practiced the confusing and cobweb-bound older science with which (from memories of school and university) we are still so vaguely familiar."

I have to admit that the excessive build-up did make me curious about what had changed so dramatically in recent times. So it was a huge letdown to learn that the major difference between the Old Geology and the New Geology was the introduction of plate tectonics—something that I learned about in elementary school 20 years ago. All this dramatic build-up was essentially for nothing; the amazing New Geology was the only geology I had ever known. That whole dramatic build-up led me literally nowhere; it was nothing more than the rambling reminiscences of an older man who had learned a now-outdated school curriculum 50 or 60 years ago.

Apparently this whole geological revolution was inspired by the moon landing, which gave people the unprecedented idea of looking at the world as a whole. I have my doubts. Wikipedia tells me that plate tectonics were accepted in the scientific world in the late 1950s/early 1960s, while Neil Armstrong didn't step foot on the moon until 1969. The whole introduction was just garbage.

Maybe the book got better after that, but I wasn't about to trust this author with any more of my time. I didn't read past the prologue.

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After the recent earthquake/tsunami/nuclear-meltdown in Japan I wanted to read a disaster book, and Simon Winchester offers light entertaining non-fiction about an old scar that has since healed, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (and fire). Most of the book is about earthquakes in general, and the

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potential for another big one in the near future. It's not Winchester's best book, it's mediocre really, and there are probably better earthquake books, but being an Anglophile I enjoy listening to his accent and tweedy style in audiobook format.

Some of the things I learned: the San Andreas fault is currently 17' behind, meaning the next earthquake will shift at least that far in one big jolt. The other big fault in the USA, centered in Memphis TN, is caused by upwelling underneath the middle of the North American plate, like a pimple, and not plates rubbing together, like San Andreas. Thus when a quake hits Memphis, it's like a hammer hitting marble, the waves spread far across a solid plate, unlike San Andreas where the ground is fractured on the edge of the plates and waves dissipate quickly over distance. I also learned there is a town in CA where the San Andreas is constantly moving 24x7, at about the speed of fingernails growing.

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The more I read Simon Winchester, the more I want to read. His style is accessible, human, and eclectic, dealing with complicated subjects in a manner that totally draws the reader into the topic. “A Crack in the Edge of the World,” you would assume from the cover blurb and photographs, focuses

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on the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Yes and no. Winchester deals with a wider topic first, global plate tectonics, narrows the field to earthquakes, narrows it again to earthquakes in the United States, further to the San Andreas Fault, and then zeroes in on the ’06 quake. Along the way, fascinating and informative digressions take place, little anecdotes that not only amused me but informed me.

Winchester doesn’t just focus on the physical geology of earthquakes, although there is plenty of that. A full social history of San Francisco, before and after the quake, is also presented, and as someone who knows a bit about the subject, I can say that the information is accurate and entertaining.

Winchester’s formal training at Cambridge was in geology, and, like John McPhee, took a sharp turn from that discipline into journalism. With both of them I find the same love of fact and detail, and luckily for us, the ability to weave facts into accessible prose. I’m gathering more of Winchester’s books to see what I’ve missed.

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Winchester is sometimes guilty of confusing wordiness with descriptiveness. All his books have a plodding element that prevents them from joining the ranks of their betters. His writing needs a braver editor to confront this and push back. He neither succeeds as a rigorous or inspiring writer of

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science, nor as an insightful observer of socioeconomic history. But he tries. Enjoyable but fails to impress.

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Simon Winchester’s “A Crack in the Edge of the World” is a dense tome combining Winchester’s twin loves of travel and geology. Half travelogue and half plate tectonics lesson, Winchester delves deep into the history and formation of the American continent and how San Francisco came to be

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settled on uniquely unstable ground. Unfortunately, the author’s breadth of scope and lack of succinctness result in an overly long book that can’t stay focused.
“Crack” is only about half-concerned with the great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. “The savage interruption” does not take place until page 243, more than sixty percent of the way through the book, not including the appendix, bibliography, and other ancillary pieces. Rather, much time and many pages are spent on a variety of topics including, among others, the literal and figurative creation of the American West, San Francisco’s rise to prominence as the cultural and social center of the west coast, and the author’s travels across the North American plate to various geologically sensitive areas including New Madrid, Missouri, home to the most powerful North American earthquakes east of California. While most of these topics would be interesting reads on their own (particular Winchester’s discussion of the North American plate’s relatively calm eastern edge in Iceland compared with its infamous western edge at the San Andreas Fault), putting them all together creates a jumbled story that, while interesting in pieces, serves little other than to perpetually delay the main course.
Once the sleeping giant awakes, Winchester fails to do the one thing his books are often famous for: creating interesting characters. In his previous works, Winchester has had no trouble finding interesting people in even the most mundane of situations, whether it’s an insane murderer and the Oxford professor who created the preeminent work on the English language (“The Professor and the Madmen”), a nudist Oxford science professor who fell in love with his Chinese graduate student and then her country (“The Man Who Loved China”), or the man who invented the modern science of geology but ultimately found himself penniless and imprisoned when his fellow scientists stole his work (“The Map that Changed the World”). Here, though, the most colorful character is Enrico Caruso, the world-renowned Italian tenor who, among other Metropolitan Opera performers, put on a stirring showing of Carmen the night before the earthquake, was shaken out of a drunken stupor in the morning, and then made his way out of the city as quickly as he could. Normally so skilled at world and character building, Winchester’s failure here robs his narrative of the color and import it should otherwise deserve.
This isn’t a bad book. The narrative of the earthquake and its aftermath, once Winchester gets there, is respectable, but the meandering road he takes before arriving is aggravating while his failure to provide us with characters to care about or invest in deprives the narrative of urgency. Ultimately “A Crack in the Edge of the World” is decent popular history, but it doesn’t stand up to the other work of Winchester’s oeuvre.

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Winchester takes an oftentimes intriguing macro-view of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fire, but the most interesting parts of this pop-nonfiction recount are not necessarily the seismic elements.

Though Winchester is apt to rehash--watch out for pedantic repetition if you already

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have even a passing understanding of plate tectonics--there are great passages about the human and physical history of San Francisco. Factoids abound, and some of the anecdotes are worthy of repeating to one's friends.

Pruned a bit and without the somewhat tenuous personal-geological-discovery road trip subplot (especially the epilogue trip to Alaska, which seems shoehorned in), I'd give it four stars.

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I read this book for research purposes. While I did fill it with sticky notes and found the read overall quite rewarding, I was also left with a strong sense that it could have been a much better book.

Winchester is a very knowledgeable fellow. The book is framed around his own travels to places

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like Iceland and then across North America, from Charleston, to New Madrid, and on westward to San Francisco. His goal is to explore tectonic theory and how the San Andreas Fault fits into the larger scheme of the living world. The data is quite interesting, but at the same time he rambles. It's like he came across too much good information and tried to squeeze it into one book. This creates a problem when a book about the 1906 earthquake doesn't get to the actual earthquake until page 241.

This also creates the odd dilemma in that it felt like little of the book was on the actual quake. Information on the aftermath is interesting, such as the struggle to get insurance companies to pay up (especially German-based ones), and the plight of the Chinese and the ensuing wave of "Paper People" who tried to take advantage of or were genuinely lost because of the loss of immigration paperwork. He then, however, devotes too much space to how the "wrath of God" aspect of the earthquake inspired the Pentecostal church movement. Even his trip to Alaska to discuss the fascinating matter of how the pipeline has been created to withstand earthquakes is colored by derogatory comments on towns along the way, including a slam against Wal-mart that felt out of place in its arrogance.

In all, its an interesting book that's diluted by too many tangents. Still worth reading, though, even if it caused me to roll my eyes or skim at times.

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I'm a big Simon Winchester fan, but admit I didn't find this outing as engaging as some of his others. Yes, there's a ton of engrossing info here about the Great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, but you'll have to wade through some extraneous material to get to it. I'm a professional geologist,

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and even I found his chapters on the geology of California to be tedious! Apparently he's got a passion for geology and is unaware that, at least here in the U.S., the concept of plate tectonics is introduced in the 4th grade, rendering much of his hand-holding tedious. There are also several over-long sections devoted to his personal travels, interests, theories, and opinions.

But this being a Simon Winchester book, this is also filled to bursting with fascinating detail, all of it extensively researched and entertainingly retold. Winchester's tangents - the settlement of California, the integration of Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, the emergence of insurance agencies, the roots of Pentecostalism, etc. - are often as intriguing as his central narrative. Most folks will go into this with some prior knowledge of the earthquake and its consequences, but I guarantee they'll emerge with a much deeper appreciation of the historical, cultural, and geologic implications of this seminal event.

My recommendation: definitely worth a read, but give yourself permission to skim the long chapters on plate tectonics and cut Winchester some slack for the parts that come off as self-indulgent or opinionated, because the payoff is worth the price.

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Finished A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester.   

Notice that the subtitle on the cover is: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. I think I didn't fully grasp Winchester's focus here, even though I have read his previous books Krakatoa and The Map that Changed the

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World, both of which centered around geology. What I expected was more focus on the mayhem of the earthquake and fire. But you have to read almost half-way through before he buckles down to the actual event of 1906. The first half of the book explains plate tectonics, faults, geologic time and other aspects of New Geology, so you more completely understand what happened in San Francisco. Winchester articulated as simply and clearly as possible this (to me anyway) arcane science.

In an epilogue, Winchester puts other earthquakes (including the 1989 SF 'quake and two Alaskan 'quakes) into the story, as well as connecting variations in seismic activities in Yellowstone to activities along the San Andreas Fault.

Not what I expected, but nevertheless an interesting and informative read. I'll give it a thumb up.

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Simon Winchester has elevated the language of science to the language of poetry. His eloquence will hold the attention of and also captivate the reader with his brilliant explanation of the formation of the earth, the ocean floor, the plates that shift and slide to wreak havoc or as he might say

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cause mischief in so many places. He describes such things as the molten lava “breathing” beneath our surface in such a way that you see the river of fire. He describes the movement of the faults so that you see them slipping and sliding under each other, layered irregularly atop each other, forming ridges like those in a carpet, as commonplace as a crease in a piece of fabric. He uses metaphors and similes to enlighten the reader and make the subject fluid rather than as arid as science can sometimes be for the layman.
When Winchester likens the movements of the plates to a freight train stuck on the tracks with only the center moving outward, the reader can surely see the force of that pressure as it moves the front of the cars forward, finally, in a burst, resulting in the return of that bulge to the center, although in the front there may be concomitant damage; and when he describes the ripple that erupts in a carpet, sometimes, after walking on it repeatedly, the reader will see that “pleat”, as he calls it, forming a mountain one day as it continues to rise. When he describes the splitting water mains and the rupturing gas lines, the reader can feel the disaster in San Francisco approaching, along with the heat, strong tremors and fear, as well as the astonishment and wonderment also felt by some victims. Winchester brought the dry science behind an earthquake and other natural disasters to life. I could visualize the earth forming, the continents moving and the oceans spreading as the earth moved beneath me. With a vocabulary that has become obsolete in the pens of most writers, as they concentrate on sound bites and acronyms, he has mastered the art of prose, making often unfathomable subject matter less bone-dry with his use of language.
Winchester speaks of Freud, Einstein, and Caruso in a casual manner as he creates the foundation for his story with vignettes that sometimes make the reader smile. He begins with the moon landing of Neil Armstong and tells the story of our magnificent planet. Viewing the earth from that bird’s eye view, he describes the inner core beneath the earth’s crust so well that you think you are listening to the secrets of a mystery novel that are slowly being fleshed out, when actually you are being presented with scientific facts. Traveling up and down the western coast of the United States, his explanations burst with information that are at once comprehensible rather than opaque. His research gleaned from journals, diaries and letters is impeccable and his knowledge coupled with his writing skill has made this a very enjoyable, informative read. I know that he placed me in San Francisco at the moment of the quake. I could almost feel the turmoil as the earth raged beneath its surface wreaking havoc above it.
Today, the technology has improved so much that analysis is done by machines more often then people, but the first hand accounts did not contain the coldness of the machine, and therefore the story was connected to emotion. I learned of the reputation San Francisco had when it was born, I could see the cavalier attitude that prevailed, the indifference to any impending disaster, although there had already been some in the previous century. He even draws a relationship between the rise of radical faiths like Islam and Pentacostal Evangelists during catastrophic times, equating the catastrophes to a sign of G-d’s displeasure and a need for doubling down on their dogma. His analysis of the behavior of the insurance companies during the disaster is still relevant today!
Although I cannot profess to have understood every word of this highly detailed and descriptive book, concentrating on the April, 17, 1906, San Francisco earthquake, I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this author read his own book with just the right tone and emotion to capture my ear completely. The book is both entertaining and informative.

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Simon's writing was dry, relying to heavily on facts to draw the reader in. Other authors have managed to blend the factual research with individual accounts in a way that flows easily. Erik Larson did an excellent job with Isaac's Storm (an account of a hurricane), but Winchester fails to connect

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with the reader. Instead his book feels clinical, referring to one person's account of the earthquake as an "anecdotal example." I loved learning more about San Francisco's history and the science behind the earthquake, but I wish he had made the book less like a term paper.

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Too tecnical--not for the average reader, diod have some interesting spots, however.

Winchester really only begins to write about the subject of the title of the book when he is 170 pages in to the story....which gives you a good idea about how this book pans out. Far too much technical information about earthquakes etc for my liking, so much so that it becomes a little like a text

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book. There is some undeniably fascinating history involved here and there but on the whole I think Winchester gets bogged down in all the research he did for the book.

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This is a great book as long as you are interested not only in the history of the SF earthquake, but also plate tectonics and other geological information. Very thorough and ultimately very scary for anyone living in the part of the country.

Another entertaining, highly informative book from Simon Winchester. He begins by musing about a small town in Ohio, the hometown of astronaut Neil Armstrong and the sea change to geology that resulted from his walk on the moon, the development of the theory of plate tectonics. He then goes on to

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give a chatty account of the history of geology and California, all the while veering off into fascinating and humorous side stories about people and places, as he winds his way towards April 18, 1906 and the destructive earthquake that devastated San Francisco.

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[Simon Winchester] is a marvelous writer and though this work is not the equal of [[The Meaning of Everything]] or of [[Krakratoa]] it has to be one of best ever written about an earthquake that ocurred before Winchester was born. He covers the earthquake from every angle and he does it in such a

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way that you feel like you were there to see it in person. He gives you the history of San Francisco, he gives you the science of earthquakes, he gives you the events of the day of the quake and he describes the panic of the people in the quake and the misery of the thousands left homeless. He tells about the government of San Francisco and the lack of any building codes and the disheveled fire department with its useless fire hoses because their was no water in the fire hydrants. Winchester gives you the complete story but he does it in such a way that you enjoy the building excitement and though you know the outcome you keeping wondering what else he is going to throw in the fire. The power behind Winchester's stories are the people which he describes convincingly and with enough character to either root for the good guys are turn thumbs down to the bad guys. And whether you want to or not you know a lot more about the science of earthquakes after reading this book.

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Far more interesting than I had expected. The author goes off on many tangents and that added a great deal of interest to the whole story. Also embedded is a mini course on Geology which is quite useful to understand what is going on underneath us.

My favorite Simon Winchester, by far. I don't know how many times I've read (and listened to) this work. Few authors could make so many loose threads into a meaningful picture. Winchester does. He makes science make sense, in a most lyrical way.

Winchester's prose is a bit purple, but the facts are interesting.

The underlying theme of this book is that geology preempts geography.

This is a reasonably interesting book about the San Francisco Earthquake and the fires that followed. It starts out very strongly, with some really engaging writing. But after a while it seems to lose steam. I found it to be a lot less interesting and very difficult to maintain enthusiasm after the

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quake itself. Where Krakatoa made good parallels to the modern world regularly, which seems a stretch on its face, this book should have had an easier time with that but fell down.

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I read this book on a cruise heading to San Francisco and it enhanced my appreciation of the history of the town enormously. I must confess, as Winchester says in his book, San Francisco and the effects the earthquake had on it, were what I expected the book to be about, but it has fascinating

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anecdotes and digressions about exploration and settlement in the American West, about th odd habits and proclivities of geologist and other scholars involved in the study of geology. This book is well worth a read. Extremely entertaining.

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