Editorial Review:
The international bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa vividly brings to life the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative look at the tumultuous subterranean world that produces earthquakes, the planet's most sudden and destructive force. In the early morning hours of April 18, 1906, San Francisco and a string of other towns were overcome by an earthquake registering 8.25 on the Richter scale, resulting from a rupture in the San Andreas fault. Lasting little more than a minute, the earthquake wrecked 490 blocks, toppled a total of 25,000 buildings, broke open gas mains, cut off electric power lines, and effectively destroyed the gold rush capital that had stood there for a half century. Winchester brings his inimitable storytelling abilities -- as well as his unique understanding of geology -- to this extraordinary event, exploring not only what happened in northern California in 1906 but what we have learned since about the geological underpinnings that caused the earthquake in the first place. A Crack in the Edge of the World is the definitive account of the San Francisco earthquake and a fascinating exploration of a legendary event that changed the way we look at the planet on which we live.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
It worked for me.  2009-01-01
I finished reading this book yesterday. It is only the second book by Simon Winshester that I have read. The first was "Krakatoa," which a friend loaned me to read. I had mixed feelings about "Krakatoa" -- parts were really good but I felt that Winchester went off on too many tangents. In contrast, "A Crack in the Edge of the World" worked for me -- despite many reviews here which echo the complaint I had about "Krakatoa." For me, the best parts of the book were the road trip before and after he got to California. It reminded me a little of John McPhee's "Annals of the Former World." (Winchester pays a nice compliment to McPhee's "Assembling California" and his portrayal of Eldridge Moores. If you haven't read "Annals" I highly recommend it -- and "Assembling California" was my favorite part of "Annals.") For me, the slowest part of Winchester's book was the long chapter on the 1906 earthquake itself. I enjoyed much more Winchester's descriptions and visits to the sites of other historic earthquakes (Charleston, New Madrid, etc.) and the "Ice and Fire" epilogue. To me this book was more than just a popular author churning out another one for his publisher and bank account. It seemed like a labor of love. (I also found Winchester's dedication of this book to the late Iris Chang touching, as I had read Chang's "The Chinese in America" not long before.)
FWIW this is my very first book review on Amazon (or anywhere else). I almost always browse the Amazon reviews before ordering a book and many are very thoughtful, so I thought I would start sharing my opinion from time to time. (My New Year's Resolution, as it just passed midnight...)
condescending, and not much earthquake in it  2008-12-24
This British author likes rocks better than he likes Americans. Whenever Americans are mentioned it is to tell how they were stupid, greedy, liars or oafish. Surely somebody somewhere in the entire story of the San Francisco earthquake performed a kind act, or had a good insight. It gets tiresome and irritating to hear Americans so uniformly bashed.
It's also surprising how little of the book is devoted to the quake. There is a lot about the formation of the planet and the continents, plate tectonics and kinds of rocks. He almost skips over the quake in comparison: the plates moved, the ground shook and everything burnt up is about the size of it. There is no detail at all of what the people went through, how they fought the fire or who they were except to say they were all corrupt before the fire and stupid afterwards. If you think I am overstating this, listen to the audio CD. The author himself reads his book and the arch tone is unmistakable. Skip this book.
Fascinating 2008-12-19
This is another excellent story about the linkages among geography, geology, science, and history -- and also in this case, the arts -- by Simon Winchester. Although the main story is about the Great San Francisco Earthquake, the book spreads its arms and brings in relevant information about Greenland, Iceland, Missouri, Oklahoma, Southern California, Alaska, South America, England, and other places. It's a well researched, well written, and intellectually stimulating book. I've listened to the audio CD version several times and will probably listen to it again several more.
"It was a hybrid year, a year between eras, one that still balanced on the cusp"  2008-12-09
Simon Winchester always gives an exhaustive review of his subject, and A Crack in the Edge of the World CD: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 is no exception. A geologist by training, he follows up his other books on that theme -- Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 (P.S.), The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology -- with this compendium on the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906
Winchester jumps off with the view of our planet from the moon, and launches into what he calls the New Geology. A quick preview of the earthquake in question, and then we move out of the prologue and into chapter 1: a catalogue of that very dangerous year, 1906; a year similar in the scope of its farflung disasters to 2004, which began with an earthquake in Iran and ended with the terrible Sumatran tsunami.
Before returning to San Francisco, Winchester elucidates the pioneers and principles of the New Geology; in a few words, Pangaea and plate tectonics. The pushmi-pullyu of giant plates grinding and subducting and spreading over the eons. Earthquake and volcano. He takes great pleasure in standing on the eastern edge of the North American plate, in Iceland, and then driving to the western edge at the San Andreas faultline. Along the way he mentions the strange phenomena that can occur in the middle of a land mass; think just-baked piecrust, wrinkling as it cools on a rack. But the main events are at the edges. When he reaches California there is the story of western settlement and land purchase, the explosive growth of San Francisco from its tent town days through the 1840s gold rush, and into the 20th century where he attributes to it a very rough-and-tumble reputation.
Finally, the earthquake; then the cleanup, and the political fallout, quite a lot about the Chinese Exclusion Act, the flight of artists from the Bay area, and his thesis that the growth of the Pentecostal religion was due to the earthquake. Then some information about the technology of predicting earthquakes. At last, 12 hours later if you listened to the audio as I did, the end.
I liked this book very much, and even enjoyed the listening (though I needed the actual book in hand to see the maps and photos, a real drawback in audio). That said, it had an unfocused feel to it. Winchester likes to cover a lot of ground -- in this case his travels, geology, the history of the planet and of California in particular, and a detailed but somehow impersonal telling of the earthquake story along with any cultural phenomena that followed in the next few decades. It's all somehow a bit too much, though it has a compelling flow to it, like lava down a slope, cooling and slowing and then being overtaken by another molten wave of well-crafted words.
You will have to judge whether this book is for you. It was a four-star "listen" for me, though not my favorite of his books. What can I say? I like the way the man writes.
Linda Bulger, 2008
Literature trumps history  2008-11-25
Literature trumps history
Simon Winchester writes with an admiral skill. His presentation of the geology and the contemporary reports of the San Francisco earthquake are intriguing, sometimes riveting. But his historical generalization are often far fetched or just simply inaccurate. Because I listened to the book on tape I did not make a list of all the times I gritted my teeth because of an overstatement. It began with odd comments on the history of science which mentioned something about big ideas versus the triviality of what used to be called bench science, the hard daily work of scientists accumulating knowledge. Winchester put down the latter while praising the former. Somehow the geologists prior to plate tectonics were undistinguished fact grubbers, while the grand theorists of that subject, along with Darwinian evolution, and maybe DNA were the real contributions to science. I guess Darwin's eight years of careful dissection of barnacles which were crucial to his ideas about evolution stand for little. In fact the plant collector and taxonomist Wallace built that dull series of thousands of careful boring observations into what we now know of as island biogeography, or the thousands of scatter experiments of the late 19th century became the theory of the atom. Here is where the demands of making interesting literature come in conflict with the complications of history.
A few instances I can recall from the book are the doubtful claim that San Francisco was sin city par excellence in the late 19th century. If I remember my Carl Sandburg well enough, I thought the painted ladies under street lamps in Chicago vied for that honor, or that the earthquake led to the ascendance of L.A. over Frisco in California. While Winchester does say there were other factors, he keeps reasserting the claim. What about the role of the movie industry and WWI and II's aircraft industry? These had nothing to do with the destruction of S. F. Or that as he claimed in his book on Krakatoa, for the origin of Muslim fundamentalism, somehow an apocalyptic cult's anticipation of a horrendous catastrophe was the beginnings of the Christian right. Father Coughlin's fascist Catholicism during the depression was hardly Pentecostal nor was the racism of protestant populism during the last quarter of the 19th century to be laid at the feet of the earthquake. Yet they are both constituents of the Christian right. The claim for Krakatoa again makes good wake-up reading but has nothing to do with Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia or fundamentalists in Singkiang in central Asian who preceded it and then raised their heads again under Chinese oppression. And what about the claim often made that Indonesian Mohamedism was the most secular in the world.
So while I had trouble with the way Winchester made up eye-opening historical claims to keep his narrative going, I couldn't help admiring the literary skill which he used to wrap many interesting things around a book which would have been one third as long had he just stuck to the earthquake, its causes and affects on people. I really liked the narrative of people's experience during the earthquake, the local geologists clocking it as it was happening, And Winchester did put in work to get material for the book. His final foray up the Alaska Highway to see the earthquake induced twists in the Alaska oil pipeline meant days of driving. But what did his offensive comments about living accommodations in Watson Lake have to do with the book. Although that route used to be my stomping grounds, his narration of his trip seemed irrelevant, mere filler. I kind of wondered why he didn't take the Cassiar Highway, a shorter but less historical route.
If I were to be a more responsible reviewer I might go back an underline every dubious historical claim but it is not worth it. The book is good light reading even if its depth is wanting. Charlie Fisher
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