My recommendation: I received six free non-fiction books from Netgalley at the same time, including this one. I decided to read the first few pages of each, and then choose the book with the most interesting and promising beginning to complete first. This book won the competition. The rest of the book galloped along at a good pace and was a pleasure to read.

A mansplaining paragraph for the uninitiated: Many of us who read and review a lot of books here at Goodreads are offered free electronic copies to review before publication. The rationale is, if I understand correctly, that people are more likely to consider a book with any recommendation, even if they are lukewarm, before they'll buy a book with no recommendations. I think there are several ways you can acquire books in this fashion, but a service named Netgalley is used very frequently.

Christmas is a time of year when many books are sold, for obvious reasons. With that in mind, August and nearby months are times when the free books come hot and heavy on Netgalley, presumably because it takes a while for even the most dedicated reviewers to read and then write about their advance review copies. That's why I suddenly couldn’t resist downloading an avalanche of the sort of non-fiction books that float my boat, even though I already have piles, both literal and figurative, of books that I haven't read.

In this case, I found myself unable to resist downloading books on the following topics: Irish-Americans, Wild West Outlaws, 19th-century travelers to Siberia, Roman roads, and Franz Fanon. But this is the one that grabbed my attention.

The structure of this book is not revolutionary, but effective. The prologue begins with the final routine moments, early in the morning of Wednesday, April 18, 1906, and then after the earthquake struck at 5:12am, mostly from the point of view of one police officer who was on the street when the earth shook. Chapter One then goes back and reviews the long history of settlement by indigenous inhabitants, Spanish missionaries, and others, before getting to the more recent history, including the market-driven frenzied and slapdash development of San Francisco after the 1848 Gold Rush, rendering the city a tinderbox of inadequate wooden construction. If the plan had been to purposefully set up a town that would burn to the ground, it would have been difficult to improve on San Francisco in 1906.

Here is an anecdote from Chapter One that I enjoyed. Grace Roberts was born in San Francisco in 1852.

... Grace traveled with her parents to Washington, D.C., at the age of eight and met President Buchanan at a reception, where he took her hand and remarked, "You are the oldest native California I have ever seen."

The biggest villain in this book is San Francisco Mayor Eugene Schmitz. A handsome well-dressed musician before being recruited by millionaire political boss Abe Ruef to lead the city, Schmitz turned out to be completely unsuited to managing the city. Schmitz illegally declared martial law in and, also illegally, issued shoot to kill orders for looters. The actions by themselves might be considered understandable and pardonable, if not legal, given the chaos and post-earthquake isolation of San Francisco from the rest of the world. Relatively few people died as a result, and order was maintained.

More damaging and stupid was the order by Schmitz to dynamite buildings to create a firebreak only if the buildings were already on fire which, as the author remarks several times in the book, had the effect of spreading the fire more effectively and rapidly than doing nothing would have, as tiny flecks of fiery paper and wood floated on the wind, setting fire to the rest of the city. The well-respected and very experienced chief of the San Francisco fire department, who might have been in a position to correct this error, had been mortally injured in the collapse of his home while sleeping. His deputies couldn’t attend meetings of the powerful, even if they had been invited, because they were very quickly too busy jury-rigging the city’s damaged infrastructure in order to attempt to put out actual fires. This error went uncorrected for days, as did the “declaration” of martial law.

Often books chronicling important events in the past are written and published to coincide with important anniversaries, but in this case the book will appear on the year which is the 117th anniversary of the earthquake and fire. I speculate on why it appears now. Probably the subject was interesting to the author, which is reasonable, but also because, in my sight, the biggest bestseller that appeared around the 100th anniversary of the disaster seems inadequate. This book, by comparison, keeps it focus on San Francisco and seems admirably determined to fit in as many actual names and experiences of average San Franciscans as possible, especially if they died in the disaster. This surely took a tremendous amount of work, combing through old books, newspapers, magazines, letters, oral histories, diaries, death certificates, Red Cross registration cards, and so on.

After 1906, Schmitz and Ruef were indicted and disgraced on corruption charges unrelated to the earthquake and fire, but it felt like they got off easily. (Schmitz even ran successfully for a lower-level political office in San Francisco, post-disgrace.) As the author says:

The folly and greed of men entrusted with the public good had ignited a firestorm more violent than the earthquake and a disaster that outlasted the flames. Their failures had nearly toppled the city's achievements, their crimes went beyond condemnation, and the suffering they caused reached deeper than sorrow.

I hope that I'm not giving the impression that the book has a lot of sanctimonious finger-wagging. It doesn't. It says what happened, but it also keeps you turning pages. It's a good book.

As mentioned previously, I received a free electronic advance review copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

The Longest Minute by Matthew J. Davenport, was received directly from the publisher and I chose to review it. I am a bit of a history buff and great earthquakes always interest (and frighten) me. This book kind of flowed, with the topic never getting dry. I learned also about the Great Fire and how fires were so common in San Francisco after the Gold Rush made the village into a city. If you, or someone you buy gifts for is interested in San Francisco's history, the 1906 Earthquake, the 1906 Fires, give this book a read.

4 Stars

What a wonderful book. Pieced together from many historical documents, letters from the era and other sources. Not as dry and didactic as you would imagine but written in very readable manner. Thoroughly enjoyable.
Thanks to the author, publisher., and NetGalley for the advance review copy.

I’ve read a number of books about the 1906 SF earthquake, so I was interested in what possible new information “The Longest Minute” by Matthew Davenport would contain. Mr. Davenport mentions in the beginning of the book that he gained access to numerous letters, reports, and accounts of the earthquake many of which had never been presented in book form. He’s right - while I’ve read accounts of the earthquake from primary sources, this book included a lot more detail. Mr. Davenport has numerous footnotes and sources - in fact nearly 40% of the book is devoted to said sources. The research that went into this book is plentiful. Interestingly, the text isn’t as dry as I expected - especially with so many sources. If you are one who is interested in knowing more about the 1906 “Big One,” or you’ve experienced an earthquake yourself, or you like history - this may be a book to pick up. It’s not a light fluffy read, but it’s jam packed with factual information.

Synopsis (from Netgalley, the provider of the book for me to review.)
*********************************************************
Matthew J. Davenport’s The Longest Minute is the spellbinding true story of the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco, and how a great earthquake sparked a devastating and preventable firestorm.

At 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck San Francisco, catching most of the city asleep. For approximately one minute, shockwaves buckled streets, shattered water mains, collapsed buildings, crushed hundreds of residents to death and trapped many alive. Fires ignited and blazed through dry wooden ruins and grew into a firestorm. For the next three days, flames devoured collapsed ruins, killed trapped survivors, and nearly destroyed what was then the largest city in the American West.

Meticulously researched and gracefully written, The Longest Minute is both a harrowing chronicle of devastation and the portrait of a city’s resilience in the burning aftermath of greed and folly. Drawing on the letters and diaries and unpublished memoirs of survivors and previously unearthed archival records, Matthew Davenport combines history and science to tell the dramatic true story of one of the greatest disasters in American history.

When an earthquake occurs when many people are asleep, it may be better for them as they may not even wake up before they are crushed to death. I know, macabre, but would you want to wait for that to happen to you? The fires that followed were just as bad: I cannot imagine waiting to be burned to death but in those days, things moved slower and there were not as many support services as there are now when you call 911.

There is a lot of research in this book, but it was right up my alley: I love reading history and how it affected people who lived (or didn’t) live through it. Highly recommended for individual readers and book clubs. #shortbutsweetreviews