We have all had those professors who have spent a lifetime sticking interesting facts into their heads. These facts may be pertinent to their particular line of enquiry for which they are considered an expert, or they might be random interesting tidbits of knowledge that have been squirrelled away for future research.
They might even be just fascinating stories that may have very little to do with anything else. Except of course that everything is connected. Degrees of separation and all that. I had this Russian history professor at the University of Arizona who was decades removed from his best years, and nearing the time when someone was going to start talking to him about all the time he will have to devout to research The hook, in other words, was coming soon.
His diseased spine bent him forward. It required some effort for him to raise his head far enough to look someone in the eye. He had a full beard, still naturally black despite his age, which made him look very Russian, and therefore, very authentic when discussing Ivan the Terrible or the Cossacks.
He would pace back and forth with his hands behind his back gazing at the floor as he lectured. He always wore this black coat.
I was once talking to him after class when he fumbled open the black buttons with thick fingers and flapped the jacket open. Sweat stained his shirt from his armpit to his waist, and the fetid odor of fennel marinated in vodka and stale socks blossomed in the room. He was a terrible rambler, skipping from one point in history to another, and throwing in bits and pieces of history outside of Russia as well. One day a student interrupted him for the second time to ask, yet again, if what he was discussing was going to be on the test.
He asked her very kindly to leave the room and to please drop the class. Mostly, I just wanted to stay quiet, and let him talk about whatever he wanted to talk about.
Most people expect and want things presented to them in a linear fashion, so I was not surprised to see the class shrink in size as students abandoned ship for the lifeboats with the hope that some other teacher would provide them with more pleasant waters to float in.
Now the reason I tell this story is that this book reminded me of that professor. Simon Winchester has written a book that is not easy to categorize. Is it simply a book of random musings, loosely contained to a theme by duct tape and bailing wire? Is it an indulgent travelogue? Is it a geology seminar? Is Kenny G playing saxophone in the background? The subtitle of the book is America and the Great California Earthquake of From perusing quickly through other reviews, there were many readers who were very frustrated with the fact that the book was not focused on the topic they were most interested in reading about The title is mildly misleading, but then again I think there was an editor, a publisher, and a writer who were unsure of exactly how to categorize this book and decided to simplify things for marketing purposes.
The Eastern edge of the North American Plate reminds me of fortresses from another time. The edge forms a dramatic, though stable geography that certainly lends grandeur to any gathering. We cross the U. He climbs Mount Diablo and catches a clear enough day to be able to gaze upon San Francisco. My feeling that this was a confection of untoward and only half-urban-looking delicacy was confirmed by the magnifying lenses.
How tightly San Francisco appeared to cling on to its hillsides: One would imagine knuckles whitened, sinews straining, teeth gritted. We slide over to Parkfield, California, which right now is the seismic capital of the world with numerous earthquakes per month that range up and down the richter scale. We go to Alaska to see where the trans-Alaska pipeline crosses the Denali Fault.
The pipeline is crooked like the back of my professor and placed on rollers that will hopefully give the pipeline enough give to not rupture if an earthquake does occur. He does spend a decent amount of time talking about the 8. He tells individual stories, some of them by famous people, some of them just incredibly unlucky people like Paul Pickney who had the distinction of surviving the Charleston trembler and the San Francisco quake.
One of my favorite stories involved a four year old Ansel Adams who was thrown to the ground during the quake and cracked his nose. His parents and doctor decided not to fix the nose, and it became the most rugged feature of his famous, classical profile. They believe over people perished, but due to a conspiracy of suppression of the actual numbers only were officially claimed. For the city to rebuild they needed more people to come West, and they quite effectively controlled the narrative of the extent of the destruction.
It is a rare opportunity indeed to have your picture taken in front of such devastation. Irrefutable evidence that you were there. I thought it was interesting how suicide rates went way down after the earthquake.
People suddenly had something more, something larger than themselves, to worry about. If their lives were stressful or pathetic or wretched before the earthquake, suddenly all of that was swept away, along with quite possibly all that they owned in the world. I have often thought that, if everyone had to worry more about day to day living, many of our psychological problems would be reduced in size or even possibly eliminated. I think we have too much time to think about our current state of affairs, many of them beyond our control; and yet, we are swimming in a relative lap of luxury and safety compared to most of human history.
It is so difficult to be happy. Maybe we own too much and try to do too much. The San Francisco quake, called the Loma Prieta Earthquake, that occurred in was not, as everyone hoped, a releasing of pressure along the San Andreas. This means that an unimaginably enormous amount of kinetic energy is currently stored in the rocks of the Bay Area; one day, and probably very soon, this energy will all be relieved, without warning.
I was finally drifting off to sleep after sifting through some of the last pieces of information that Winchester had stuck in my head when I felt or heard a jolt that brought me wide awake. The window in the bathroom rattled. I knew it was an earthquake. My daughter texted me from her apartment in Wichita.
I found out the next morning that it was a 4. To say this book moved me would be an understatement. View all 25 comments. The story of how I started reading this book begins outside San Antonio, as I guided my Subaru Outback onto Interstate, set the cruise control, and settled back for the long, empty ride to El Paso.
Anyway, we had miles to go to our overnight destination in Silver City, and precious few radio stations to help us pass the time. Though I contend that my vivid retelling of the slaughter at Goliad was worth at least an hour to an hour and a half.
The first thing we noticed was that Simon narrated this himself, in his rich, Oxford-ian accent, which sounded suspiciously like an average American actor attempting to impersonate a snooty English butler. The second thing we noticed was that his narrative didn't seem to be going anywhere.
The audio book was so bad it was funny. But after awhile, it was just bad. Accordingly, my wife hit the eject button, and we settled for the tense silence that comes from driving 1, miles and visiting four separate battlefields in four days. It was the same digressionary, drifting storytelling as before, except this time it was up to my brain to provide the British accent. And unfortunately, my brain often confuses British and Scottish accents.
The book description and the subtitle might lead you to believe it is about the Great San Francisco Earthquake. Mostly, though, this book is about Simon Winchester, and how he is smarter than you, more well traveled than you, and generally better than you in every particular facet of life.
A Crack at the Edge of the World begins with Simon conning his publisher to pay him to travel across the world on a geologic journey, visiting places of seismic importance. Never mind that this mainly consists of Simon driving across the United States making condescending remarks about middle-America, he sure seems to be having fun!
He is. He certainly, most definitely, is intelligent. I know, because he told me. He also has a strong background in geology, so he can articulately expound about all the complex business going on beneath our feet.
This is all well and good, except that geology is boring except for the earthquakes so get to the damn earthquake already! Simon gets to the earthquake, rest assured.
It just takes pages of meanders, digressions, and entirely useless footnotes about topics completely unrelated to anything remotely touched-upon in this book. The ceaseless introduction of know-it-all non sequiturs might not have been so annoying in a book of more elegance.
The problem, though, is that these detours are interspersed with a lot of seismological jargon that requires slow, careful reading to make any sense.
This is a short book that feels long, and it feels long for all the wrong reasons. As my frustrations grew, I imagined myself driving a car with Simon Winchester and Jonathan Lipnicki the little boy from Jerry Maguire as passengers. Geological Survey took a violin with him into the field to serenade coyotes? Because I am. The section of the earthquake is necessarily disappointing.
It just underwhelms. Interestingly, the thing you tend to take away from this account of the earthquake — and which is echoed in other sources — is that most of the death and damage came from the resulting fire. He keeps warning us that a super-earthquake is going to knock California into the sea; yet he never acknowledges that the story he just told is a cautionary tale of building codes and effective fire response.
To be sure, no one ever went broke warning of our impending doom. All Cassandras — like the original Cassandra — will eventually be right; tragedy is always right around the corner. I am fond of the small literary sub-genre of travelogue-histories, in which a writer goes on a personal journey to visit all the artifacts and the curators watching over them that combined to make a historical event. Sarah Vowell Assassination Vacation , The Wordy Shipmates is a delightful tour guide, and her books brim with chirpiness and humor.
Tony Horowitz Confederates in the Attic , A Voyage Long and Strange brings a more sober, journalistic discipline to his work, finding unforgettable modern characters who are almost mystically connected to the past. Simon Winchester is just as talented as Vowell and Horowitz.
I would love to take a road trip with Sarah Vowell or Tony Horowitz. I tried to take a road trip with Simon Winchester. We heard his voice on the radio and quickly gave up.
He is, after all, the smartest person alive. And that bunny would listen for awhile, hoping that this odd man with the refined accent would get to a point. Finally, the bunny would give up and bound away. And the night would go on, the stars would come out, and Simon Winchester would still be speaking into the void. View all 6 comments.
Mar 21, Diane rated it liked it Shelves: audiobooks , nonfiction , disaster , history , science. This is a fascinating but also frustrating book about the devastating San Francisco earthquake and fire of Simon Winchester has a passion for geology, which makes him a good person to write about this topic. However, his passion is such that he gets carried away on long tangents, and in truth, this book meandered so much that I nearly abandoned it in frustration.
The meandering starts early, with a long prologue about Neil Armstrong and how his trip to the moon affected the way scientists This is a fascinating but also frustrating book about the devastating San Francisco earthquake and fire of The meandering starts early, with a long prologue about Neil Armstrong and how his trip to the moon affected the way scientists think about the earth. There are also long passages on the history of geology and plate tectonics, along with the author's exploratory trips around the world.
There is interesting stuff here, but the information could be have been streamlined. After several chapters, we finally focus more on the California earthquake of , which was my favorite part of the book. Winchester describes the causes and effects of the quake, which was followed by a devastating fire that lasted several days and destroyed much of San Francisco. There is also a discussion about how a major earthquake is expected along the San Andreas fault sometime before This section was truly alarming, as was the chapter talking about other fault lines expecting a major rupture in the coming decades, including the New Madrid fault line in my current state of Missouri, which could be devastating for a large chunk of the Midwest.
The last section of the book also meanders a bit, with sidenotes about the history of the insurance industry, and how certain businesses tried to downplay the damage of the Frisco earthquake There are interesting details about how the Chinese immigrants were treated both before and after the earthquake, with some city officials trying to drive them out of town.
I also appreciated Winchester's description of how San Francisco was viewed in the late s and early s, and how the earthquake forever changed the city. Overall I liked this book, which includes good photographs and maps, but it seemed like Winchester tried to combine two subjects into one: the history of geology, and the disaster.
The text of this runs more than pages, and I liked most of it, but it needed more editing and revision. Simon Winchester is a prolific author, and I especially enjoyed his earlier work, The Professor and the Madman, which was about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.
I would recommend A Crack in the Edge of the World to readers who like works about natural disasters or geology, but be prepared for a lot of roundabout discussion. Favorite Quotes "There is a tendency common to most of us to take the more modest of our landscapes for granted.
We see a wide and fertile plain, and we drive across it, as fast as its flatness allows, rarely pondering what might have brought it into being. We come across a valley, and, though we might take pleasure in its appearance, we give it all too little thought, other than perhaps to assume there is probably a river somewhere within its folds, And, while we are generally awestruck by the more spectacular mountain ranges, it seems true to say that those hills that are simply hills, or those mountains that are simply mountains, rarely prompt us to ask: Just why are they there?
What forces first made them and set them down here, in this particular place? Life returns, buildings and roads are rebuilt, new monuments spring up or old ones are found and dusted off, and before long the city returns to its old self, ready to see what more fate can hurl at it, to challenge and strengthen and temper its will to survive. It may not always entirely regain its predisaster status — San Francisco had to cede much to Los Angeles, for example, But generally, so far as their respective quiddities are concerned, great cities always recover.
Apr 01, Trevor I sometimes get notified of comments rated it it was amazing Shelves: history. I think the only reason I would read a book on Krakatoa is because Winchester wrote it. It is also very likely that the only reason I would read a book on an earthquake is because Winchester wrote it.
Let me tell you what there is to love about this book. Firstly, Winchester starts off by talking about the Gaia Theory — essentially that everything is related to everything else. He does this because talk of earthquakes has only begun to make sense since we learnt of plate tectonics — that the continents float about the world on huge plates and that these rub up against each other and cause volcanos and earthquakes.
And one of the most fascinating things about plate tectonics is that this idea has only been around in science since the s. Think about that for a moment — that we have only had any real idea about the how and the way of volcanos and earthquakes for a little over forty years. Prior to the s we also had a very localised view of how these catastrophic events happened. We still have only hints about how these two events might be related, but the fact we can even seriously ask the question now ought to send a shiver down your spine.
And just to celebrate, Winchester writes his books in a way that brings to the fore layer after layer of beautifully observed relationships between earthquakes and racism and artists leaving for the hills and architecture and religion.
This is fiction after all. His relationships never fail to delight. His keen eye for both the fascinating and the absurd never fail him. I really am very fond of his books and this one is no exception. There is a part of this book where he is describing the horrific fire that started as the earthquake ended. This was a city ready to burn, and the quake bursting both gas pipes and water pipes beneath the city did much to strike that particular match.
There is a photo in this book taken from the top of a hill. In the distance you can see the smoke billowing and being blown into the background of the picture.
How Winchester explains what you are looking at and what is about to happen in the world of this photograph is one of those moments in a book that is a pure joy. He starts off by stating what we all think — that fires move in the direction that the winds blow them. Clearly, in this photograph, the wind is blowing towards the back, so that will be the direction the fire will go. He then points out that what is in the distance behind the scene in the photograph is water and already burnt buildings.
It is then that he says that city fires not only make their own winds, but that they move in the direction of the fuel that is available — not always in the direction of the wind. One of the more fascinating connections with this earthquake was the start of the Pentecostal movement. The pastor who started the Pentecostal movement said, a mere three days before the quake and fire, that God was preparing a sign — and when God prepares signs, he provides the entire Burma Shave experience.
The most Godless city in the United States virtually wiped off the map in one go. View all 5 comments. This one was tough to rate. This one however, is written in a very scientific manner. Further, at an average of Yeah, yeah, I'm a numbers geek. While I enjoy learning new words and usually have a dictionary nearby as I read, this book slowed me down with the number of times I had to stop and look up words. Here are a few examples from page of the hardcover edition: gasconading lickspittles, gimcrack houses, panjandrum, and Spanish-speaking hobbledehoys.
The story of the San Francisco earthquake just gets lost in the scientific jargon. View all 3 comments. Oct 17, Becky rated it did not like it Shelves: history , meh , needs-to-bepages-shorter , dnf , the-worst , physical-library-read. I am pages from the end of this tome, and you know what? I am going to DNF hard. I just dont care about it anymore.
I just have too many other books to read before I due to continue on with this self-absorbed shit. This was my last attempt with Winchester. He simply isn't an engaging author.
I find him pompous and his books horribly bloated and lacking in any energy, connection, or emotion I am pages from the end of this tome, and you know what? I find him pompous and his books horribly bloated and lacking in any energy, connection, or emotion.
I've read state budgets that were more interesting. View 2 comments. Jan 11, Shawn rated it it was ok Recommends it for: Geology and Non-fiction buffs. Like a train wreck, I can't look away. The earthquake that most notably affected San Francisco is a fascinating topic, and I like books with a bit of Science in them, but oh my god! I just have to prove it with a couple of examples, but truly sir: Mr. Winchester, I implore you, where are your trustworthy editors?
Nowhere, mon frere. Example One in my hypothetical thesis entitled "why Simon Winchester is a pain in the ass": in one paragraph Like a train wreck, I can't look away. Example One in my hypothetical thesis entitled "why Simon Winchester is a pain in the ass": in one paragraph pgs. Winchester makes use of the following words: panjandrum, lickspittle, gimcrack, gasconading. Now, I believe I have already more than proven my thesis, but two further examples for the sake of thoroughness: 2. Finally, example three has to be seen to be believed.
I think I'll just put a sample paragraph here that shows the tedious, longggggg-winded, pretentious writing style and mind you, the author seems like a good dude and all, no offense intended, he just needs a competent editor. I then had to travel another miles westward, to a village set deep in the Midwestern plains, where a seismograph is mounted inside the general store.
My second destination was a somewhat obscure and all but forgotten place, though one of some importance in explaining why America suffers earthquakes so far from the edges of the plate on which it stands. My first intended stop, however, was at a town that suffered an event that took place over a series of weeks during the winter between and —a hitherto unremarkable Mississippi riverside town that has since entered the lore and the lexicon of seismologists around the world: New Madrid, Missouri.
Nov 22, Schmacko rated it it was ok. Boy howdy, Simon Winchester sure knows his geology! And then he might get distracted by a story from his college days. I am reminded of a joke about either Tolstoy or Michener — or both — that they take four chapters to tell us about how the earth formed.
Winchester takes the whole book. The earthquake happened in a city…a city populated with people…yes, I get that there were buildings and gas pipes and other stuff there that got shook around in physically and scientifically fascinating ways, but all that stuff Winchester concentrates on was all put there by the humans that the author almost completely ignores.
The person that Simon Winchester seems most interested in telling us about is Simon Winchester. He likes big words. He went to Oxford. He knows geology. He goes camping. I now know a lot more about geology. I hate these science books by Winchester, he wreaks havoc on my Book Challenge because I cannot zip through it. I have to slow down and really enjoy it. The SF story is more interesting for the attempt by politicians and others to remake the event into a slight tremor I hate these science books by Winchester, he wreaks havoc on my Book Challenge because I cannot zip through it.
The earthquake released about 21 feet of movement along the San Andreas fault. According to Winchester in , there was 17 feet of fault slippage stored up as of An old science, completely remade in a generation. For eons it kept sinking back into the mantle just a few millennia after it had formed, utterly wrecking itself in the process—and then it would popup out of the molten ocean of lava and be reborn in a totally different guise Instead, all of a sudden, large chunks of crust were staying afloat, more or less permanently.
In cooling, the crust was forming itself into rocks that would themselves be permanent— if only the external forces permitted them to remain at the surface and did not try to drag them or push them down toward the heat again. As they slowly cooled, some of these rocks-to-be separated themselves out, according to perfectly understandable laws of physics: The lighter materials of the scum rose to the surface, the heavier ones passed downward in one enormous fractionating column—a little like the Skaergaard, though over infinitely longer periods of time and under very different physical conditions The lighter materials generally formed themselves into those rocks we now call granites—the course-grained rocks that tend to be prettily light in color as well as in constitution The heavier fractions created layers of rocks like basalt and diorite and gabbro, which were darker and tended to sag downward under the force of gravity forming sloughs, whereas the granites tended to form uplands.
Dark rocks underlay the seas; granites made up the new continents. And this law of basic igneous geology has remained a verifiable truth ever since. The new crust, as it spread and wafted itself around the surface of the sphere, also became cracked, as cooling crusts of clinker and furnace slag are wont to do, and the plates, or rafts, or slabs of floating or sagging clinker that were then formed between the cracks began to swirl about, thanks to the currents of terrifyingly hot material that were as they still are today upwelling and sinking back underneath.
No doubt the slaggy scum came under the influence of other forces. The third planet from sun, it must be remembered, is in geological terms a comparatively small ball of material, subject to all manner of kinetic and thermal influences; and the first continent-in-the making was turned this and that for millions of years, as it struggled gamely to get a grip on itself and remain more or less in place on the ever-changing molten mantle that underlay it.
Winchester takes a circuitous route to San Fran but I just loved the journey. Not for everyone but worked for me. Good account of the earthquake and the aftermath. Oh, and he leaves us with a warning about the super-volcanic hot spot beneath Yellowstone, actually the cycle for this one to blow is due anytime.
Just great fun reading! View all 8 comments. This is a mostly delightful tour of geology, earthquakes and plate tectonics, with an emphasis on California's infamous San Andreas Fault and the earthquake that devastated San Francisco.
I can highly recommend it. Much to the delight of info gluttons, Winchester as always ranges widely from the nominal focus of the book.
Any reader looking for an in-depth history of the whys and wherefores of the earthquake and fire will be more than satisfied, as well anyone wondering about the broader sur This is a mostly delightful tour of geology, earthquakes and plate tectonics, with an emphasis on California's infamous San Andreas Fault and the earthquake that devastated San Francisco.
Any reader looking for an in-depth history of the whys and wherefores of the earthquake and fire will be more than satisfied, as well anyone wondering about the broader surrounding topics.
Of course, if you want your author to go straight to the heart of the matter, this isn't your book and, furthermore, you really should forego any of Winchester's books. By the way, this book was more personal to me than to most of you out there: I've lived in San Francisco for almost my entire adult life, and I'm a third-generation Californian and almost a third-generation San Franciscan. I've backpacked for many years in the Sierras, thrown up millions of years ago by the mechanisms he describes in the book, and I felt connected to every scene he describes in the city.
Still, my reaction to this book isn't unalloyed praise. I think there were several false notes. The more obvious one was the connection to Pentecostalism. I agree it was an important phenomena of the time — actually, I wouldn't be here if my mother's parents hadn't found each other while attending a Pentecostal church during the depression.
But the movement almost certainly would have taken off with or without San Francisco's earthquake; that kind of exuberant religiosity seems to be a fundamental part of U.
Despite the specific anecdotes that tie the two stories together, I felt it was really a post hoc, ergo propter hoc kind of connection, and detrimental to the book's focus. The other significant annoyance was that several times the author referred to San Francisco and other places in close proximity to the fault as "very dangerous". Now, maybe when the Big One hits I'll change my tune, but substantially fewer than Californians have died in earthquakes in the past century.
As I'm writing this at the end of April , and the New York Times just reminded me that three years after the Loma Prieta earthquake which killed 63 in the region , Los Angeles lived through the Rodney King riots, which killed And, of course, at least 15 and possibly many more have just died in the explosion of a fertilizer company in Texas. Frankly, life is dangerous; everyone dies in the end.
Living in an earthquake zone does slightly raise the likelihood of dying prematurely or being seriously injured , but there are many, many other factors that affect mortality rates even more.
Coastal California — right along the San Andeas Fault — has a famously benign climate, for example. I suspect the overall health of the locals is higher because of it, and probably lengthens their life expectancy more than the earthquake risk shortens it. Winchester even makes fun of the residents of Portola Valley , a town that lies directly upon the fault line — amused at how they argue endlessly about whether and where to move this building or that, only to go back to sipping their sauvignon blanc.
He agrees that their "way of life [is] quite unrivaled in its quality anywhere in the world", yet still thinks that there can be "no greater monument to hubris" that the choose to live there. I suppose he really thinks they'd be better off somewhere else, but I think there's a lot of hubris in his assertion that he is right and several million residents of the San Francisco Bay Area are being irrational. Perhaps he should have asked the scientists at the Menlo Park's USGS — the same folks he thanks for helping in his studies.
After all, their office is on alluvial soil about eight miles from Portola Valley, and they undoubtedly live in the area. It apparently did not occur to Winchester to ask them what they feel about that risk. I'll take the certitude of a quake and its consequent increase in my mortality over living elsewhere, thank you.
Jun 13, James Peavler rated it liked it Shelves: This book only gets a three from me because I felt it was falsely advertised.
As a Bay Area native, earthquakes have always held a strong fascination for me. I experienced a fairly large one in , and my memories are still as strong today as they were then. So when I pick up a book that gives me an impression that its about the year , and the seismic activity that occurred all around the world that year, ending with the ultimate seismic event near the shores of San Francisco, it was disco This book only gets a three from me because I felt it was falsely advertised.
So when I pick up a book that gives me an impression that its about the year , and the seismic activity that occurred all around the world that year, ending with the ultimate seismic event near the shores of San Francisco, it was disconcerting to read about the geologic history of the earth. As fascinating as that was, when over half the book is about the formation of the earth and the world as we now know it, and the Great Earthquake of seems to be almost an afterthought for the final or so pages.
It's a time in California history that I find enthralling, and was nestled in my bed ready to read about how the ground rolled and the buildings fell and fires consumed, yet I had to dredge through why Iceland is where it is and why dirt in Japan is related to dirt in Africa. Believe me, it was interesting, but when you pick up a book expecting one thing and read another, it's a disappointing experience. By the time I actually reached the earthquake in San Francisco, I could have cared less at that point.
I just wanted to be done with the book. Now I'm surprised to see so many people who didn't like this book, but I'm guessing it's more a matter of style. Winchester certainly does take his time getting to the San Francisco part of this book but it is " America and the Great California Earthquake However, it's the kind of book I like, much more about "why" and "how" rather than "who" and "when". I would recommend it, especially if you liked "Krakat Now I'm surprised to see so many people who didn't like this book, but I'm guessing it's more a matter of style.
I would recommend it, especially if you liked "Krakatoa". It takes Winchester nearly pages to get into the meat of the story -- the Earthquake that destroyed San Francisco. Until then, we have to wade through tales of his Oxford days and camping on Mt. A tough read that brings little joy -- although he does capture the sense of magic we all feel when discovering, and re-discovering, San Francisco. Some exerpts: "There is a tendency common to most of us to take the more modest of our landscapes for granted.
We see a wide and fertile plai It takes Winchester nearly pages to get into the meat of the story -- the Earthquake that destroyed San Francisco. We see a wide and fertile plain and we drive across it, as fast as its flatness allows, rarely pondering what might have brought it into being. We come across a valley, and, though we might take pleasure in it appearance, we give it all too little thought What forces first made them?
It was quite unlike New York or Chicago or Boston. Those places were gray, massive, battelship-like cities, cities that were indelibly written into, and indestructibly welded onto, their landscapes But not, it seemed to me, this preternaturally beautiful city of San Francisco How tightly San Francisco appeared to cling on it its hillsides: One could imagine knuckles whitened, sinews straining, teeth gritted. Jan 02, Curtis Edmonds rated it it was ok. Let us suppose that you are to take a flight from New York to California.
Only when you arrive, you find that your flight had been cancelled. The only flight available is out of Newark Airport, and it routes through some airline hub out in the middle of the country — Houston or Dallas or Chicago or Cincinnati, take your pick.
So you get on a shuttle bus and head for Newark, and board your new flight, and sett Let us suppose that you are to take a flight from New York to California. So you get on a shuttle bus and head for Newark, and board your new flight, and settle in for a long siege. And somewhere, over Kansas, you speculate that you are still a long, long way from San Francisco. Author Simon Winchester is metaphorically speaking headed for San Francisco, but it takes a damnably long time to get there, and there are more detours along that route than even the most unfortunate airline reader will ever encounter, much less countenance.
To give you an idea — just an idea — of where A Crack in the Edge of the World is going, the book starts in Wapakoneta. The OverDrive Read format of this ebook has professional narration that plays while you read in your browser. Learn more here. You've reached the maximum number of titles you can currently recommend for purchase. Your session has expired. Please sign in again so you can continue to borrow titles and access your Loans, Wish list, and Holds pages.
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Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help. Search Search Search Browse menu. Sign in. Audios 3 Hours and Under! A Crack in the Edge of the World. Description Creators Details Reviews The international bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa vividly brings to life the San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion.
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