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    A Crack in the Edge of the World
    A Crack in the Edge of the World
    A Crack in the Edge of the World
    Audiobook12 hours

    A Crack in the Edge of the World

    Written by Simon Winchester

    Narrated by Simon Winchester

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The international bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa vividly brings to life the 1906San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative 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 towns to its north-northwest and the south-southeast were overcome by an enormous shaking that was compounded by the violent shocks of an earthquake, registering 8.25 on the Richter scale. The quake resulted from a rupture in a part of the San Andreas fault, which lies underneath the earth's surface along the northern coast of California. 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 throughout the Bay area, and effectively destroyed the gold rush capital that had stood there for a half century.

    Perhaps more significant than the tremors and rumbling, which affected a swatch of California more than 200 miles long, were the fires that took over the city for three days, leaving chaos and horror in its wake. The human tragedy included the deaths of upwards of 700 people, with more than 250,000 left homeless. It was perhaps the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

    Simon 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. But his achievement is even greater: he positions the quake's significance along the earth's geological timeline and shows the effect it had on the rest of twentieth-century California and American history.

    A Crack in the Edge of the World is the definitive account of the San Francisco earthquake. It is also a fascinating exploration of a legendary event that changed the way we look at the planet on which we live.

    Editor's Note

    Masterfully crafted...

    This masterful narrative of the geological, economic, and cultural impacts of the infamous San Francisco quake of 1906 is historical writing at its very best: smart, informative & compelling.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateOct 4, 2005
    ISBN9780060894214
    A Crack in the Edge of the World
    Author

    Simon Winchester

    Simon Winchester is the acclaimed author of many books, including The Professor and the Madman, The Men Who United the States, The Map That Changed the World, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and Krakatoa, all of which were New York Times bestsellers and appeared on numerous best and notable lists. In 2006, Winchester was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty the Queen. He resides in western Massachusetts.

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    Reviews for A Crack in the Edge of the World

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      This account is heavy with technical information on geology and is pretty heavy going for one not too excited.by the technical aspects of its subject. There are no footnotesor source notes but there is an extensive bibliography. The account of the earthquake in San Francisco, when the book finally gets around to telling about it, is full on interest--certainly better done than the only other book I have read on the event:, The Great Earthquake, by Phillip Frankin (read 11 Nov 2005). The discussion on the inevitability of a future cataclysmic earthquake in California makes me glad I don't live theere.
    • 4/5
      Interesting book about the geology of the North American continent and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Winchester lays a lot of "groundwork" before getting to the earthquake itself.
    • 3/5
      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 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.
    • 4/5
      He took to long to make his point. I became impatient with his conclusions.
    • 5/5
      A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester Review of the Audio Book. Simon Winchester has one of those voices that can really get up your nose. I find him tedious and slightly patronising and smug (but I have forgiven him). I've tried several of his other works and given up on them. I don't know why but this one worked for me.I found it engaging and put across in a way that held my interest. I liked they way that he sprinkles factoids here and there and his little digressions I found filled in details in this huge canvas. I liked his systematic approach to the science as well as his ramblings.Interestingly a few months after listening to this the city where I live was devastated by a huge earthquake, not once, but several times with many lives lost. It was his descriptions of the aftermath of San Francisco that really came home to me then. How fragile our lives and cities are.My understanding of what had happened was definitely better thanks to this book and the reality of what happened here made terrifyingly clear how this "solid ground" can not only move but the sheer scale of the forces involved cannot truly be grasped in a real sense. Prior to this I had only read numbers.Even if you are not that interested in Geology give this a go.
    • 5/5
      I've read and enjoyed several of Simon Winchester's books, and this is my favorite thus far. This story abounds in historical interest, geological drama, and the bizarre coincidences that delight both Winchester and his readers.The early chapters paint the broad backdrop of the 1906 earthquake -- both a cultural portrait of 19th century San Francisco and a geological profile of Western North America. In some Winchester books, the sections on geology can be largely review for readers who are (now or have ever been) geology majors. Here, however, the basic earth science is mixed with the history of scientific discovery and Winchester's travelogue of seismologically notable America. It never fails to engage and intrigue.Of course the earthquake itself is fascinating, and Winchester weaves a compelling story out of past destruction, present danger, and the mythos of frontier America.
    • 4/5
      Wonderfully detailed account of the science and geology of earthquakes, specifically focusing on the 1906 SF Earthquake. Does not overly dwell on this specific quake, but rather places it in the context of history and geography. Premise of the book being the planet is an immense interconnected whole, one happening triggers another.
    • 4/5
      This book was a comprehensive look at anything and everything that can be remotely connected to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and ensuing fire. Winchester gives a whole lot of background information that puts the damage in context. The phenomenon of plate tectonics explains how the energy built up and then burst out causing the tremendous shaking. The history of the westward expansion explains the growth of the city at that time.What I found to be the most interesting, and well worth wading through all the technical and historical background material, were the first hand accounts of the shaking and the pictures of the damage. I was inspired to make the trip to the top of Mount Diablo and enjoy the scenery from up above. Having lived in the area for almost 30 years, I enjoy learning more about its geology and history.We just observed the 110th anniversary of the quake. Every year it is observed in the chill early hours at the historic fire hydrant and Lott's fountain. It serves to remind everyone in the area of the constant threat we are under and the glorious forces which cause earthquakes.
    • 4/5
      Author Simon Winchester was originally trained as a geologist and it shows; the account manages to be technically correct, engagingly well written, and erudite (Winchester uses “thixotropic” in a sentence) simultaneously. This is not a chronological narrative; Winchesters segues faultlessly from first-person descriptions of the earthquake, to the history of San Francisco, to a detailed but highly readable explanation of plate tectonics, to accounts of earlier American earthquakes (1886 Charleston, 1811 New Madrid), to early geological surveys of the United States, to recent California quakes. Some of this comes as commentary to a cross-country trip Winchester took, with stops at historic intraplate earthquake sites (as well as Meers, Oklahoma, where paleoseismology shows huge fault displacements in the past few thousand years but nothing of particular interest in recent history). With a background firmly established (all the way to the first hint of plate tectonics, about 3 Gya), Winchester then gets back to the 1906 earthquake.
      Lots of fascinating eyewitness accounts of buildings falling over, the ground undulating, and general seismic mayhem. San Francisco was a machine politics city at the time, and many of the public building had been poorly constructed by politically connected contractors, resulting in collapse of many stone and brick buildings, while wooden buildings survived – temporarily. The earthquake was followed by fire, as numerous stoves overturned, gas lines ruptured, and electric wires shorted. With most of the water lines broken, the fire was eventually contained by dynamiting firebreaks. The politicians later seized on the fire as the “actual” cause of the disaster, believing that it would be easier to get financing to rebuild the city if it were not perceived as being in an earthquake zone. Official documents always referred to the “Great San Francisco Fire” rather than “Earthquake”. Insurance companies got into the act; those people who had policies covering earthquakes were told that the actual damage to their property was caused by fire, and those with fire insurance learned that their houses had been destroyed by an earthquake and reduced to a valueless heap of rubble before burning (Lloyd’s of London was an honorable exception to the trend and paid all claims).There’s a terrific appendix detailing the various earthquake magnitude and intensity measuring systems – Rossi-Forel, Omori, Mercalli-Cancani-Sieberg, Modified Mercalli, Medvedev-Sponheuer-Karnik, and European Macroseismic Intensity for intensity; and Richter for magnitude (although, unfortunately, he doesn’t explain why the Richter scale needed to be modified to handle ultralarge earthquakes). There’s also a short explanation of difference between S- and P- waves and how this is used to locate a distant earthquake.Terrific maps, great glossary and bibliography, and very entertaining as well as educational.
    • 3/5
      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 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.
    • 4/5
      Super interesting tie ins of history and geology, politics and personal experiences.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      Excellent attention grabbing historical story telling at its best.
    • 2/5
      I love science, history, and trivia, but this book is terrible. It's dull, to start with, and right off the bat I felt like I was slogging through it. It's not about the 1906 earthquake; I have no idea what it is about. It is way more about Winchester than the 1906 earthquake, I can tell you that much. I couldn't even finish (and I almost never stop a book before finishing). I tried to keep reading because there were interesting tidbits scattered throughout, but it just wasn't interesting or useful enough to keep reading. I even started making a list of the things I didn't like:- Offensive nostalgia for the 19th century and its portrayal as a simpler time with no acknowledgment of things like slavery or lack of women's rights, among others.- Criminal lack of focus including the moon landing, the author's multiple road trips, his Oxford explorer's club trip to Iceland, the history of many other earthquakes, the history of California and the gold rush.- Lots of disdain for southern and western Americans, but a song of love towards San Francisco and California in general. I've lived in San Francisco; it has downsides too. - The author seems to think he is a lot funnier than he is.- On p125 he decries the savagery of the greed and "barbarism" of the frontier towns during the Gold Rush, comparing them unfavorably to the "civilized" Eastern and Midwestern cities. Anyone who has read a history of Chicago or New York City in the mid-1800s should laugh at this notion. "There was murder, mayhem, robbery, alcoholism, depression, and suicide" - I'm sorry, what urban area in ANY era didn't have these things?- Slut-shaming on p 126.- P130; the actual sentence "indolent handful of Mexicans"- Talking about the unpeopled west when native Americans definitely lived there. And a whole thing about "at this point [probably the 1800s, during western exploration by Americans] the Colorado River had been seen by relatively few people." I'm... pretty sure plenty of people had seen the Colorado River by the point it was the 1800s. Just not by white people. Speaking of which, this book was published in 2005 and he still uses "Indians" to refer to Native Americans. Really.- Maligning someone for dying of syphilis; TONS of people used to die of syphilis. - A story about him visiting a meteorite impact site and being told it was owned by people with a specific last name, and he recalls knowing a couple with that last name, so he calls them from the site and finds out of course it's the same people! So he puts the owner on speaker and the owner thanks the visitors for paying the fee because it keeps them in good champagne, which makes me want to have a class war and nationalize the site to make it a national park. Because how obnoxious is that.
    • 4/5
      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 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.
    • 5/5
      I have been to San Francisco a lot and it is hard to imagine the tremendous power lying just below the surface. Winchester again does his meticulous research to bring people and events alive.
    • 5/5
      I was in a Seoul bookshop desperately looking for something appropriate in English when I saw "A Crack in the Edge of the World" sitting on a shelf. As a bonus, it was selling for about half of the normal (high) cost of an English language book in South Korea. I'd like to think it wasn't a bootleg.Anyhoo, this is a great read, covering issues around San Francisco's history and how it was the preeminent California city until the earthquake, geology, plate tectonics, Enrico Caruso and more. Winchester has a writing style that leaves you turning the page for more, which was a problem in this case as I was soon again left desperately looking for another English book in Seoul.
    • 1/5
      Too tecnical--not for the average reader, diod have some interesting spots, however.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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 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.
    • 4/5
      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 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.
    • 4/5
      Winchester's prose is a bit purple, but the facts are interesting.
    • 5/5
      I read this and gave it away to a friend who really loved it. Be sure to get the cover that opens out into a poster.
    • 3/5
      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 "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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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 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.
    • 3/5
      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 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.
    • 3/5
      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 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.
    • 5/5
      I grew up in San Francisco; now I'm nervous every time I go back for a visit!