Alice B. reviewed on 9/29/2016 + 3563 more book reviews

This is a thriller beyond thrillers. But it is a true story.What a great guy Marc Reisner was. He wrote A Dangerous Place: California's Unsettling Fate as he was dying of cancer, and it's not just a benchmark of California's environmental history but also a profound and emotional valedictory effort. Living as I have on the grumbling and growling Hayward Fault, I found Reisner's projections of the cataclysmic effects of the Big One to be more than unsettling. Those of us who have been privileged or now doomed to live in this glorious state cannot fail to take heed of the picture he paints of the likely events surrounding our upcoming tectonic hiccups, belches, and sneezes.In case you did not get It , I moved out of California. I went through a number of earthquakes and I had enough of living on the edge.

The book is divided into 3 sections. The first retells California's environmental history from the era of Junipeo Serra's mission system right up to our own freeway system. The middle section deals with the fundamentals of plate tectonics. But it's that 3rd section that looks forward to (shudder) a hypothetical eruption of the Hayward Fault in 2005 that is most gripping. It is just plain scary!
I salute a great environmentalist and author.

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