The Crack at the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906

Simon Winchester is the author of The Crack at the Edge of the World. In 1906, there were powerful, destructive earthquakes from Taiwan to South America. In San Francisco, a quake occurred just after five in the morning on April 18, causing fires that raged for three days, destroying much of the city. This was the world's first major natural disaster to have been extensively photographed and covered by the media, and is the subject of Simon Winchester's latest book. He is also the author of The Map that Changed the World, The Professor and the Madman, and Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883. Simon Winchester has worked as a foreign correspondent for most of his career, although he graduated from Oxford in 1966 with a degree in geology and spent a year working as a geologist in the Ruwenzori Mountains in western Uganda, and on oil rigs in the North Sea.