Book Review: The Great Quake

The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet
Henry Fountain
Geology, biography

The 1906 San Francisco quake gets all the press, but the 1964 Alaska quake was bigger. How much bigger? Oh, about 90x as powerful, in terms of total energy released. The human cost was limited only by the limited population in the area. As it was, the entire city of Valdez was flattened, abandoned, and rebuilt from the ground up--four miles inland, on bedrock.

Not only that, the Alaska quake came at a crucial point in the development of geoscience. The theory of (what's now called) plate tectonics had been floating around since the 1920s; in the 1960s it was beginning to gain currency. Evidence from the Alaska earthquake provided crucial support.

Those are the two threads that Henry Fountain builds The Great Quake around. It's a nice piece of work. Fountain very sensibly chooses one primary viewpoint character for each thread--geologist George Plafker and schoolteacher Kris Madsen--with other characters weaving their ways into and out of the story. The result is one part human tragedy, one part scientific detective story.

Both parts are good, too (which doesn't always happen with this sort of book). The picture of the sheer unstoppable devastation caused by the quake is particularly vivid. Streets ripple and crack. Slabs of concrete shear off the sides of buildings. A ship, 441.5 feet long, rocks in the waves so that its brass propellor appears above the houses. Tsunamis reach, in some cases, hundreds of feet above the water line. On the scientific side, too, Fountain has chosen a very appealing main character to follow: a working-class Brooklyn kid, who fell in love with geology almost by accident (and who's still alive, at the time of this typing).

The Great Quake is a good science book for non-scientists. It's also a good sociology book for non-sociologists, and a good piece of human-interest reportage to boot. It's well worth your time.

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The inevitable John McPhee has to be mentioned here, once again, both for his books about geology (collectively known as Annals of the Former World) and for his book about Alaska, Coming Into the Country. Simon Winchester's A Crack in the Edge of the World is a good account of the San Francisco also-ran.