“This briskly and vividly written work, exhaustively researched in archival, manuscript, periodical, and personal sources, is a definitive triumph of scholarship.”—Choice
“Fradkin does an admirable job of examining the event - and, more importantly, its aftermath - from previously unexplored perspectives, and includes a sympathetic portrayal of the much-maligned Abraham Ruef, an attorney and so-called political boss indicated on graft charges shortly affeer the earthquake.”—Nora Sohnen East Bay Express
“Fradkin writes beautifully, in a spare, no-nonsense style.”—Shana Loshbaugh Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
“The definitive work on the events of 1906 and their aftermath, a must-read to understand what actually happened, what it meant for the men and women who lived there, how it reverberates through California history and the lessons for our times, including the tragic events of Hurricane Katrina.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Indeed, for all its horrific incident, ‘The Great Earthquake’ proves an inspiring, even endearing book, full of colorful anecdotes and charming details, encyclopedic in scope and powerfully evocative of San Francisco in its golden age. The panorama Fradkin offers the reader is so sweeping and so vivid that one might be tempted to call his book cinematic, were it not for the fact that all those disaster movies seem so bland by comparison.”—Jonathan Kirsch Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A splendidly researched and well-written history of one of this country's great urban disasters. . . . While most historical accounts deal with the damage from the quake and the ensuing fires, Fradkin takes the reader well beyond the devastation to explore the aftermath, when a San Francisco oligarchy imposed its will on a fractured city and displayed an ugly racism and human nature at its sometimes worst. . . . With a reporter's eye for detail, Fradkin delivers in a most compelling fashion.”—Sacramento Bee
“A rich potpourri of . . . finely sifted details.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Fradkin is an impassioned writer who knows his subject. . . . He writes that he sees his book not just as a history but also as ‘a disaster manual for the future.’ I respectfully beg to differ. Rather than a manual for the future -- of which there is no shortage -- Fradkin has given us something much more valuable: a clear-eyed view of our past.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“The city ignored its uneasy history, and civic and military officials brought on much of the chaos and many of the deaths, the author argues.”—Robert Taylor Sunday Times
“Earthquakes unpick political, social and economic vagaries to turn crises into catastrophes. Human stories arguably become more potent in historical post-mortem. Philip Fradkin’s dissection of the humbling of San Francisco in The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906 . . . provide[s] a backdrop to the idea of earthquakes as cultural shocks.”—The Times (Uk)
“Meticulously researched in local archives, [Fradkin’s] book's aim is to tell the story of what happened from the viewpoint of the people who lived through it. . . His account of what happened above ground is first-rate.”—Times Higher Ed Supplement (Thes)
“Provides a richly textured, informative, compelling account of agonies that deserve to be recalled.”—Times Literary Supplement (TLS)
"Before he wrote books, Philip Fradkin was a newspaperman, and this vivid book has the directness, the reliability, and the reliance on original sources of good journalism. It dismisses some of the legends of the earthquake and gives us new information just as gripping. I am already using it as a reference book, and it is sure to become a standard source for everyone writing about 1906, a great historic event that has previously generated little but untrustworthy and dilatory histories."—Rebecca Solnit, author of
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West"The masterful Philip Fradkin once again plays Sherlock Holmes to Western environmental history. None of the standard histories of the 1906 disaster are likely to survive the exemplary jolt of his remarkable new research."—Mike Davis, author of
Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster