San Francisco Is Burning

By telling the story of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fires through important but little known figures, Dennis Smith makes the catastrophe personal and heightens its impact. He focuses on a naval officer who helped save the wharves, the corrupt mayor, and the debonair city political boss. But he doesn't neglect the minute-by-minute details of the disaster. These portions translate especially well to audio and are the most compelling. Alan Sklar does a solid job of narrating, never resorting to false drama. However, a bit more emotion at times would have been more engaging. Also, the author inserts historical asides, which slow down the reading and leave the listener wondering why the author included them. R.C.G. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

August 15, 2005
Firefighter turned author Smith (Report from Ground Zero
) performs an exhausting autopsy on the temblor and subsequent fire that devastated San Francisco 100 years ago. With 92 chapters, the narrative effect is one of a nervous cameraman trying to take in everything (the chapter on Enrico Caruso jumping from his bed at the Palace Hotel is one paragraph long) and managing to make a distant event seem even more remote. The author takes aim at the procedures of the official response and the chain of command, considers whether the army did more than the navy and presents "what-if" scenarios that will appeal most to students of how to manage a natural disaster. An "especially cruel irony" was the fact that saloons were ordered closed on the day of the fire, yet there, in bottles, jugs and kegs, "was undoubtedly enough wine to extinguish the early fires." Smith too often pauses to backfill the careers and family histories of various personalities or discuss the tectonics of earthquakes. His firefighter's-eye-view of the disaster will have a tough time competing with Simon Winchester's terrific A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
, due out in October.