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| A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 | 
 enlarge | Author: Simon Winchester
Publisher: HarperCollins
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  94 reviews
Sales Rank: 35375
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Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.2 x 1.2
Dewey Decimal Number: 979.461051
ASIN: B000PD3MH0
Publication Date: October 1, 2005
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| Customer Reviews:
 Writer is so pretentious, it becomes unreadable December 25, 2005
13 out of 20 found this review helpful
Remember the character of Diane from Cheers? The joke of her character, was a characterization of someone who is over the top pretentious. Well, if you were a fan of the show, picture an episode where they were exagerating her character for a joke, and you have Simon Winchester. "Stepping out of my tent and gazing upon Gemini and..." No, seriously, that is really a line from the book.
Also, there are points in the book where you have to play six degrees of Kevin Bacon, to figure out how what he's talking about, has anything to do with the big quake.
While I thought a book about the 1906 quake that devastated San Francisco would be interesting, I couldn't finish this book.
 Enthused Writer, Monumental Subject, Good Read October 18, 2005
12 out of 15 found this review helpful
I enjoy Simon Winchester's books. He picks fabulous topics, and sinks his Oxford trained teeth into them. In this case however, his topic is not as obscure as some of his previous choices and arguably didn't need retelling by yet another author.
Moreover, certain themes in the book are very poorly developed and could have been left out to good effect. The links between the earthquake and the origins of the Pentecostal church are poorly explicated and tenuous. It seems Winchester devotes the ink he does because he so bemused himself in a previous book with "similar" links between the rise of radical Islam and the eruption of Krakatoa. More problematic than these kinds of ruminations, from a scientific standpoint, is his watery invocation of the concept of Gaia theory as a "context" for the 1906 earthquake story. He invokes it, but never satisfactorily explicates why it is applicable, which would be a hard case indeed in my estimation.
I also empathize with many of the complaints found in the reviews on this site regarding some aspects of Winchester's writing style. However, I suggest listening to his unabridged audiobooks, read by Winchester himself. The prose seems far more natural when he speaks it than when I read it.
It also seems that his writing merits better editing; and in about one grievous instance on average per book, fact checking.
In "The Map that Changed the World" he erroneously refers to the extinct group of flying reptile, the pterodactyl, as the "bird progenitor" (page 109), which they certainly are not (the theropod dinosaurs are). Most twelve-year olds with a T-rex pattern on their pajamas know that.
In "A Crack in the Edge of the World" Winchester makes another egregious misstatement of fact. "And in 1867 Secretary of State William Seward bought from Russia, in what many at the time thought was an improvident waste of funds, the nearly 600,000 acres of Alaska." The date is correct, but the area is wrong by orders of magnitude. I live in Alaska, and just last year we had over ten times that many acres burn in forest fires alone. Alaska is a big state, and Alaskans don't like it when people get that wrong! The acreage purchased by the US was 378,242,560 according the Department of the Interior. As far as I can tell, Winchester has his units wrong, since the purchase equates to 591,004 square miles, not acres. This could be an excusable mistake, except separated by only one sentence, he states the correct area for the Louisiana Purchase, "530 million acres" (pretty close: 529,911,680 acres). Even this might be excused as perhaps a typo of sorts, but in his audiobook he emphatically charges right through the paragraph, apparently not catching, even when read aloud, the error made so obvious by the juxtaposition of figures. I suppose I'm being overly harsh on the Oxford trained geologist. They apparently don't emphasize American geography.
In sum, in this review I seem to come down hard on the book. Not so, I've given it 4-stars because apart from the few issues I've mentioned, it is an entertaining and accessible read about an important subject for modern audiences. However, with the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake's centennial just around the corner, I don't think I'll end my personal scholarship after this book. Next I'm headed for Philip Fradkin's "The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906." Fradkin's familiarity and excellent writings on California and the West promise his book will be authoritative and written with a deep understanding of the place. Hailing from California myself, I experienced first-hand the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, and great-grandparents of mine survived the 1906 quake. I'm considering the wisdom of ending this family tradition, but hell, what did I do? I moved to Alaska . . .
 Disordered Thought Put To Paper December 11, 2005
11 out of 16 found this review helpful
Simon Winchester penned a volume that would have more aptly come from Dr. W.C. Minor, the lunatic in his earlier The Professor and the Madman. Winchester rambles from topic to topic, paragraph to paragraph, never lingering long enough to write substantively or definitively on anything he touches. Like a schizophrenic, he freely follows one idea after another. Discontinuities in thought that mystify listeners are clear to the schizophrenic; he has only omitted one or two intermediate thoughts. In a book about the great 1906 earthquake, the jumble of thoughts is unforgivable. HarperCollins should have paid a copy editor serious money to correct the grave deficiencies of this slender volume. Winchester appears to be incapable of filtering irrelevant and trivial factoids from the book. He also lacks the ability to highlight and contextualize the significant. The people who experienced the tragedy are incidental. Logical falacies abound. My favorite is his post hoc reasoning that the Pentecostal movement and the contemporary face of evangelicalism find their wellspring in the 1906 earthquake (cf. George M. Marsden,ed., Evangelicalism in Modern America; Mark Noll, et al., ed., Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond).
His account of his trip in the middle of May 2004 from San Francisco to a point seventy miles north of Anchorage, Alaska illustrates Winchester's flawed writing. At the end of day one, he stops north of Crater Lake in Oregon and sees teams preparing for the Iditarod at the hotel. He writes, "I reached the Alaska Highway after a day and a half of driving" (p. 373). From where? San Francisco or Crater Lake? After writing about the history (?) of the Alaska Highway, Winchester informs his readers "The first night had been spent in an inn at Fort St. John; the second was at Milepost 613..." (p. 374). Fort St. John is deep in British Columbia on the Alaska Highway, not just north of Crater Lake. We learn that Watson Lake, where Winchester spent his next night, is "one of the world's nastiest towns" (p. 375). During the next day, which he calls "my third highway day," he enters the Yukon where we learn he proposes to a woman who serves him a rhubarb pie and that the capital, Whitehorse, is the same size as Pierre, SD. Whitehorse has "a Wal-Mart, and that, for me, is the kiss of death. The notion that the ghost of Sam Walton and the Brutes of Bentonville have come to linger anywhere at all in the Yukon sets me to fretting about the state of the world more than usual" (p. 375f.). And so it goes until he reaches the Alaska Pipeline, takes a picture where it shifted in an earthquake in 2002, goes to Anchorage, and departs the next day. Readers like myself are left to ponder less the mysteries of plate tectonics and more the inanity of a man who would compose a salad of ideas ostensibly about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and a publisher who did not properly edit the text.
A Crack in the Edge of the World lacks footnotes to substantive ducumentation. The quality of the photographs is substandard. At best, the book is superficial; at worst, an author and publisher are trying to bilk you of your hard earned money. Winchester and HarperCollins wasted my time supposedly writing about a defining event for San Francisco and the Western United States. They missed the boat on this book: no stars would have been more appropriate. Of the fifty or sixty books I have read in the last twelve months, none has failed to engage the subject or me as this one.
 Good overall, great at times and somewhat of a ramble December 31, 2006
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
This book by Simon Winchester has many good stories and contains as lot of useful information on earthquakes, geology and geography. It also contains a lot of good material that brings the period before, during and after the 1906 earthquake to life. However, this title also has a number of drawbacks that prevents it from being a great book.
Some of the issues for me were:
-- The title doesn't quite match the contents. The book is less focused than the title suggests.
-- I think more time should have been spent on deciding what to keep and what to cut. There is a lot of unnecessary detail and I wonder if the author forgot about the audience he had in mind as well as the main subject.
-- Sometimes the book is too rambling and the digressions are not interesting to many audiences, although extremely interesting to some. Should there have really been two even better books created from this material?
I'm not saying this book isn't worth reading. However, it's important to know what you are getting. If you want a concise and specific book on the SF earthquake alone, this is NOT it! If you want to know more about earthquakes in general and also understand more about the SF earthquake of 1906 then this might be great for you. In short, it is a more technical treatment than the title suggests and although it has a lot of good stories, they are not gathered into a cohesive well-organized whole.
 Every Once in a While the Dust Jacket Gets It's Own Review October 4, 2005
10 out of 23 found this review helpful
There's a very edgy feel to this book jacket, it actually feels cracked, sliced through, three times around the whole circumfrence of the jacket. Hats off to Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich, the designer of this jacket which puts the reader immediately in the mood of turn of the century banner headlines. Nice touch also, with the Harper Collins colophon being doubled on the spine, suggestive of The Great Fire of 1906.
Now, if you don't mind, I've got a book to read.
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