Dateline: 10/28/99
Magnitude 8 is the perfect book for the amateur seismologist, earthquake fan, or even for anyone who resides in earthquake country - but hopefully it won’t cause an earthquake for you.
Late one night I had been reading Magnitude 8 for several hours and then fell asleep. However, the next morning at 2:46 a.m. I was shaken awake by a major earthquake in Southern California. It was the first I had felt since moving to L.A. so I was quite surprised that it followed my reading of “Magnitude 8.”
Environmental journalist Philip Fradkin sets out from his home along the northern portion of the San Andreas fault in California to discover the spatial and chronological history of the fault, and its sibling faults, that have rocked California throughout history. Fradkin devotes several pages to each of the major quakes that struck California and illustrates his descriptions with first-hand accounts of such quakes as Fort Tejon (1857), San Francisco (1906), Loma Prieta (1989), and Northridge (1994).
He explores the ongoing drama behind quake prediction and the politics of development that contribute to increased population in the state’s most hazardous areas. Though Fradkin warns the reader of hazards, since he himself lives along the fault, he realizes that there are benefits to living in beautiful landscapes created by tectonic activity. Fradkin’s relaxed attitude is in sharp contrast to that of Mike Davis’ anxiety and catastrophic pessimism in Ecology of Fear.
The book avoids hard science and Fradkin avoids mentioning the exact magnitudes of specific earthquakes that have occurred throughout California in an effort of build a scenario of what havoc an actual magnitude 8 quake could wreak upon the state. He also describes how the magnitude systems reported by the media are completely inaccurate and carry little meaning to the public, as all of the major quakes he writes about in his book were major, and it should be the impact of the quake on people that matters more.
Fradkin does an excellent job of merging the human-environmental (known as the “man-land” relationship in earlier years) aspects of the earthquake hazard through his discussion of impacts upon people and human-made structures. All Californians must read this book!
Order the fascinating Magnitude 8 from Borders.com.
Read my reviews of other geographical books and products.
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