Posted on 15/10/05
Nature's way of letting us know who's in charge
A Crack in the Edge of the World:America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906By Simon WinchesterHarperCollins, 410 pages, $37.95 Two contemporary catastrophes -- the South Asian earthquake and Hurricane Katrina -- lend a terrible relevance to this remarkable work of historical reconstruction. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the focus of A Crack in the Edge of the World, was slightly more powerful than the one that recently devastated Southeast Asia -- 8.25 on the Richter scale, compared with 7.7. But, because it destroyed a far less populous area, it proved less destructive to human life, killing around 700 people instead of the 30,000 or more being predicted as the final toll in Kashmir.
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