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Sign up todayThe Longest Minute
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Learn moreThe true story of how a seismic shock sparked a devastating and preventable firestorm.
At 5:12 am on April 18, 1906, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck San Francisco, catching most of the city asleep.
For approximately forty-eight seconds, shock waves 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 destroyed what was then the largest city in the American West.
Matthew Davenport draws on letters, diaries, unpublished memoirs, and previously unearthed archival records, as well as interviews with engineers and geologists, to combine history and science to tell the dramatic true story of one of the greatest disasters in American history.
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.
Matthew J. Davenport’s first book, First Over There, a finalist for the 2015 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, was acclaimed as “a brilliant work for every library” by Library Journal and heralded by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian James McPherson as “military history at its best.” Matthew J. Davenport has been a contributing writer for the Wall Street Journal’s Books and Arts section and Salon, and is a member of the Authors Guild. A native of Missouri and a former prosecutor, he practices law in North Carolina, where he lives with his wife and two sons.
Traber Burns worked for thirty-five years in regional theater and has appeared in many television productions and commercials, including Lost, Without a Trace, Grey’s Anatomy, Cold Case, Gilmore Girls, and others.
Reviews
“A remarkably granular account of the city’s most devastating tremor and its aftermath.”
"This is heroic writing that balances the big picture with minute details.”
“Presents extraordinary research that weaves a thousand stories––from Jack London’s to a ten-year-old child’s––into one. Every page is intense.”
“Provides a terrifying and propulsive account…Davenport seamlessly weaves detailed technical explanations of city infrastructure into gut-churning scenes, often drawing from primary sources to harrowing effect..A vivid and meticulous recounting.”
“Burns’s anchorman style is at once gruff, workmanlike, and unemotional…[and] may well resemble how national and local radio announcers would have covered the disaster back in the day of the burgeoning broadcast radio industry. The author used a myriad of sources: resident letters, diaries, and previously unavailable archives.”
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