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The great earthquake that virtually leveled San Francisco a century ago next April lasted about two-and-a-half minutes. Simon Winchester has attempted a difficult conjuror's trick by turning that tiny moment in time into a 400-plus page book (he did much the same thing a couple of years ago with the cataclysmic volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in 1883).
The first earthquake tremor does not hit San Francisco until well over halfway through his book. And when he has covered both the quake itself and the disastrous three-day fire that resulted from it, the patient reader still has a ways to go to reach the end. I would guess that the actual earthquake and fire between them account for perhaps a third of the book's length.
Along the way Winchester gives us learned lectures on the relatively new science of plate tectonics, the geology of mountain-building, the history of both California and San Francisco, continental drift, the history of seismology, and of differing methods of measuring the magnitude of quakes. We go off with the author on investigative jaunts to Iceland, to a dusty general store in Oklahoma, to the wilds of northern Canada and to Yellowstone National Park.
We learn that Charles Richter, who gave his name to the Richter Scale, was a nudist and a womanizer. We find that San Francisco's mayor on that fateful day was a professional violinist. We hear a lot about the city's blatant discrimination against its Chinese residents. We are told how the quake gave early impetus to the rise of Pentecostal fundamentalist religion.
All this is certainly interesting, but it takes us pretty far afield from the early morning of April 18, 1906 and slows down the book's basic narrative. Simon Winchester is a trained geologist, and here, as in his earlier KRAKATOA, he gives major emphasis to the grinding, rubbing and colliding of tectonic plates against each other "as if in some kind of bizarre traffic accident." Later his colorful prose has those same plates engaging in "unending mazurkas and tarantellas." Along with his somewhat sententious March of Time prose style, Winchester certainly has a gift for colorful imagery.
He also has a liking for obscure words that will send readers to their unabridged dictionaries. There are a few (nunataks, candela, and most especially "thixotropically") that I could find in no dictionary.
His preoccupation with geology takes us back many millions of years, virtually to the Big Bang itself. We learn about "ma," a geologist's way of expressing the number of millions of years before the present that something (probably) happened. His book ends with apocalyptic warnings of certain disasters looming up in the near future -- which in geological time means maybe tomorrow, maybe a million or two years from now. Reader, if you live near Yellowstone National Park, or in Anchorage, Alaska or Portola Valley, California, consider yourself forewarned.
When Winchester does settle down to consider the earthquake and fire themselves, his reportage is wondrously vivid. One eyewitness saw a stampede of just-unloaded cattle roaring toward him down Mission Street, abandoned by their keepers and frightened out of their bovine wits (he shot as many of them as he could). Actor John Barrymore, well known for his laziness, was spotted trying to clear some wreckage, inspiring someone to remark that "it took an earthquake to get John out of bed." Firemen could only stand by and watch helplessly as the city burned, because the water main system had collapsed.
After the dust had cleared, many insurance companies tried to weasel out of paying claims by arguing that damage was caused by the earthquake (which was not covered by their policies) rather than by the fire (which was) -- and that the fire could not be blamed because by the time it started, the buildings were already in ruins and hence worthless.
One controversy that Winchester cannot resolve is the number of deaths. Early estimates counted around 600, but later the figure rose to about 3,000. City officials and the tourist industry of course tried to play down the extent of the devastation. The quake was felt over an area of 400,000 square miles and was recorded on seismographs all over the world.
Despite its obvious padding and ponderous tone, this book succeeds in bringing a century-old catastrophe graphically to life. I once interviewed a survivor of the San Francisco quake. What he said was certainly interesting, but it has taken Simon Winchester to make me feel as though I had been there.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
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