The beginning of the title sums up the book: Crack. This book is more a geology book than about the destruction of San Francisco. The whole first half of the book deals with the geology of the United States and the recent history of geology as a science.

Once the book gets into the destruction, it reads much as you would expect. He follows up the destruction with how it affected Religion, Art and Architecture in San Francisco.

Although the author doesn’t make the correlation, I was stuck by the similarities between events in San Francisco and New Orleans after Katrina. In San Francisco, insurers refused to pay claims because claimants did not have earthquake insurance which damaged their homes making them “worthless.” Then the great fire started and burned their homes and the insurance companies didn’t pay because the earthquake had made their home “worthless” and therefore nothing to insure. It sounded very similar to insurance companies not paying after Katrina because it was the flood that caused the damage to homes, not the hurricane.

Another aspect of similarity was the architecture. A design plan had been created for San Francisco, but so eager were businesses and people to get back to living in San Francisco that they were not willing to wait for a “planned” city to be built. This reminded me of many of the ideas for New Orleans to be rebuilt including many New Urbanist ideas; however, New Orleans seems to be trying to hurriedly get tourists back and restore the city to what it once was, not what it could be.

The last similarity is the authors’ discussion of human “hubrus” at building a city over a major fault line much as some have argued that people should not live below or at sea level in hurricane-endangered New Orleans.