Trivial Earthquake

Simon Winchester's A Crack In The Edge Of The World is the most fascinating and simultaneously frustrating book I've ever read. Chock full of scientific info and trivia concerning the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the book is also written in the most annoying self-agrandizing fashion imaginable and rambles on and over itself as if the prose were never touched by an editor. The convoluted story-telling is interspersed with personal factoids and a lack of concern for structure -- minor items in the text should be in footnotes, other plot-points in footnotes ought to be part of the narrative. (Example: after pages of foreshadowing the California Gold Rush, we read about the famous Sutter's Mill discovery of 1848. A footnote then mentions that gold was actually discovered six years earlier!)

For those that can bear this, the book is mostly concerned with the tectonic machinations of the North American Plate rather than the Quake itself. As the book struggles to connect the science with the sociological, the author's foreign antipathies become clear: he imagines the Quake's psychological effects as inducing the rise of fundementalism, amongst other evils. And near the end, as he travels through Alaska and the Yukon, the sight of a Wal-Mart make the author "fret about the state of the world". It's yet another unnecessary detour to Winchester's personal foibles that interrupts the otherwise fascinating science of a natural and human disaster.