San Antonio College Library

A burgeoning new city, San Francisco, is built on the dreams of the American gold rush. But in 1906 the dreams of this city came crashing down beneath the wave of a horrifying earthquake that turned roads into great rippling rivers, that set buildings ablaze for days on end, and that made homes collapse upon themselves.

This account of the earthquake, the firestorms that followed, and the city's subsequent reconstruction shows how humans, not the forces of nature, nearly destroyed San Francisco in a remarkable display of simple ineptitude and power politics. Bolstered by previously unpublished accounts and photographs, this history of the country's greatest urban disaster will forever change conventional understanding of the event. Fradkin takes us onto the city's...