- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: HarperCollins; Reprint edition (28 Aug 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0060084324
- ISBN-13: 978-0060084325
- Product Dimensions: 20.3 x 13.4 x 2.1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 5,434,620 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review
"Riveting . . . Kurzman brings history alive."Library Journal "[Kurzman] puts a human face on the 8.3 earthquake that rumbled through a sleeping city."Morning News (Dallas, TX) "A profound and affecting documentary of San Francisco's darkest hours."Booklist ?Groundbreaking . . . [a] fresh look at a watershed event.?San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
Product Description
In the early morning of April 18, 1906, the citizens of San Francisco woke to find their city crumbling around them. An earthquake measuring 8.3 on the Richter scale destroyed hundreds of buildings and went on to ignite rapidly spreading fires that left most of the city in ruins. As many as 10,000 people died in the catastrophe. From a young boy who searches through the rubble for his beloved classmate, to a betrothed couple separated on what was supposed to be their wedding day, to the merciless and little-known military dictatorship installed in the midst of chaos, Dan Kurzman brings to life this unparalleled event and its lingering effects.
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ENRICO CARUSO, widely acclaimed as the world's greatest tenor, had been so persuaded. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
ENRICO CARUSO, widely acclaimed as the world's greatest tenor, had been so persuaded. Read the first page
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
“Disaster!” is an interesting, anecdotal account of the lives of those who lived through the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906. The characters are many, both major an minor. After all of the attention to the September 11 attacks, it is worthwhile to step back and take a look at a natural, and even more destructive, disaster.
Among the major characters are Mayor Eugene Schmitz, Gen. Franklin Funston and Acting Fire Chief John Dougherty.
Mayor Eugene Schmitz was a former concert violinist and concert conductor who had come to power at the head of the Union Labor Party. Although committed to the promotion of the cause of Labor, he used his power to direct graft to himself and his friends. In the earthquake he saw an opportunity to win support which might keep him out of a well deserved prison term.
Gen. Franklin Funston, deputy commander of the army garrison at the Presidio, ordered his troops into the city to render assistance and to restore order. By force of his troops, Funston became, for a few days, the virtual dictator of San Francisco.
Assistant Fire Chief John Dougherty succeeded to the head of the SFFD upon the death of Chief Dennis Sullivan early in the crisis. It was he who rallied the fire fighters through the four days of seemingly hopeless struggle against the all consuming fire.
Amadeo Peter Gianini, founder of the Bank of Italy, which would, in time, become the current Bank of America, assured his place in history and the future of the Bank, by moving the vault contents to his home before the bank was destroyed by the fire.
Although the earthquake did much of the damage, even more was done by the resulting fires. Fires started by upset stoves and broken gas pipes spread and merged until most of the city was in ashes. Hampered by lack of water due to water mains broken by the fire, the heroic fire department had little other than dynamite with which to fight the fire until its progress toward the shoreline and the arrival of naval fire fighting vessels made brine available.
Police and troops used force and coercion to obtain the labor necessary to clear debris and render aid. Unfortunately, the troops also shot many innocent citizens and helped themselves to a liberal share of the booty.
Most of all, “Disaster!” is the story of people, ordinary or famous, who made their way through the chaos. The strong point of this book is less the revelation of a unified story than the interweaving of a collection of individual anecdotes. Enrico Caruso had canceled a performance in Naples due to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, only to perform in San Francisco the night before the earthquake. San Franciscans fled their homes, married and gave birth and did so many other things while their world crashed around them. Ultimately, San Francisco survived and rose like the Phoenix to create a city greater than any they had enjoyed before. Read, enjoy and be inspired.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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18 reviews
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Disaster! is an Appropriate Title
29 April 2001
Format:Hardcover
The title says it all. Kurzman is a sensation story writer. While the book itself may be a good read in the sense of historical fiction, I would not count on it to provide any insight.
On the positive, his bibliography is pretty good, and it may be that his popular press editors dumbed down the text in order to make it more accessable to the general public. BUT the section on the bubonic plague has enough problems (confusing U. S. Secretary of the Treasury Lyman Gage with California Governor Henry T.Gage, for example) to weed it out as a reliable secondary source. Kurzman claims that the first plague outbreak was caused by rats transported by ships from China carrying Chinese sex slaves, that San Francisco mayor Eugene Schmitz had a stake in the slave trade, and that he covered up the second outbreak of bubonic plague to protect his business interests. Kurzman goes on to claim that the second outbreak was brought on by infected rats fleeing from Chinatown into the rest of the city. This is all a little too speculative and sensational for my taste. Since there is no evidence, either in his footnotes, nor in the literature I know of, which would back up either allegation, I'm afraid that I cannot endorse his assertions. That being the case, it casts the rest of the book in the same weak light.
There isn't a lot of new ground covered in this book. People interested in this period of San Francisco history would be better served by reading from Kurzman's bibliography rather than relying on Kurzman to filter their history. On the San Francisco graft trials, no better book exists than Franklin Hichborn's "The System." For a revisionist view of the earthquake and fire, try "Denial of Disaster" by Gladys Hansen.
mms, Grad. Student, Department of History, San Jose State University
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Informative but not Compelling
17 Aug 2001
Format:Hardcover
"Disaster" was a disappointment for me, mainly because I'd greatly enjoyed two of author Dan Krzman's previous books, "Fatal Voyage," and "Left to Die," about the U.S.S. Indianapolis and U.S.S. Juneau disasters, respectively. Those books, in addition to being informative history, tell great stories. Alas, "Disatser" makes a similar attempt in the storytelling department but fails. The book contains plenty of facts and first hand accounts of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, but it is strangely disjointed. There are so many stories of numerous survivors interwoven together that individually they are hard to follow. And since the book checks in at a fairly brief 256 pages of text, each snippet of each story usually gets only a couple of paragraphs before moving on. Together, the stories blend into a rather shapeless mass that all start to sound alike. Kurzman would have been better served to tell his story from the larger perspective and using individual stories where they fit in. This approach served David McCullough extremely well in his excellnt "The Johnstown Flood," which serves as the ideal model for this type of book.
Overall, if you are interested in the subject matter or are a disaster buff, this book should be worthwhile with the above caveats. If you are a casual reader, you may want to consider taking a pass on this one.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
A quick and easy picture of the quake and fire...
10 Jun 2001
Format:Hardcover
Disaster seems to want to be a lively, fiction-style approach to the events, but suffers from a lack of depth and from the absence of any usable central characters. So we don't quite get a point of view strong enough to paint a compelling subjective experience, nor enough depth and detail to create a strong objective study.
Instead we land somewhere in between. Not a bad book, though some of the historic conclusions seem open to debate. It does have some nice little anecdotes, and can be read cover to cover in a light afternoon, so this might make a good overview or starting point for someone approaching the subject. Young readers would also find this handy.
If you want to see this type of historical writing done well, pick up David McCullough's book about the Johnstown Flood.
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