The Dance of the Wandering Plates

My latest choice for reading, A Crack in the Edge of the World, published in 2005, has proven to be very interesting. It's the second book I've read by Simon Winchester (the first was The Professor and the Madman), with one more to go (Krakatoa). 

Mr. Winchester has a gift for making the most complex technical subject not only understandable, but compelling.  I learned that when I read with relish his story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, a topic that would seem designed to excite only philologists. 

This time he's writing about an inherently interesting topic, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, yet he risks venturing off into potentially sleep-inducing scientific realms to bring his readers not only an appreciation of the complex geology of the earth and its capricious movements, but a much greater understanding of how devastating quakes like the one in 1906 could occur. 

I'm about a third of the way through, but already I understand more about the San Andreas fault than I ever did when I lived near it and experienced first hand its effects.  But Winchester doesn't limit himself to that one point of plate dynamics; he takes into account all the plates that cover the earth, the history of their movements (as far as we know it), and how we have come to learn more and more about them over time.

So, it's a fascinating book and I'm glad I'm finally reading it.  I'll let you know what else I discover in the next post.