Rating: 
Summary: An Interesting, Anecdotal History
Review: "Disaster!" is an interesting, anecdotal account of the lives of those who lived through the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906. The characters are many, both major an minor. After all of the attention to the September 11 attacks, it is worthwhile to step back and take a look at a natural, and even more destructive, disaster.Among the major characters are Mayor Eugene Schmitz, Gen. Franklin Funston and Acting Fire Chief John Dougherty. Mayor Eugene Schmitz was a former concert violinist and concert conductor who had come to power at the head of the Union Labor Party. Although committed to the promotion of the cause of Labor, he used his power to direct graft to himself and his friends. In the earthquake he saw an opportunity to win support which might keep him out of a well deserved prison term. Gen. Franklin Funston, deputy commander of the army garrison at the Presidio, ordered his troops into the city to render assistance and to restore order. By force of his troops, Funston became, for a few days, the virtual dictator of San Francisco. Assistant Fire Chief John Dougherty succeeded to the head of the SFFD upon the death of Chief Dennis Sullivan early in the crisis. It was he who rallied the fire fighters through the four days of seemingly hopeless struggle against the all consuming fire. Amadeo Peter Gianini, founder of the Bank of Italy, which would, in time, become the current Bank of America, assured his place in history and the future of the Bank, by moving the vault contents to his home before the bank was destroyed by the fire. Although the earthquake did much of the damage, even more was done by the resulting fires. Fires started by upset stoves and broken gas pipes spread and merged until most of the city was in ashes. Hampered by lack of water due to water mains broken by the fire, the heroic fire department had little other than dynamite with which to fight the fire until its progress toward the shoreline and the arrival of naval fire fighting vessels made brine available. Police and troops used force and coercion to obtain the labor necessary to clear debris and render aid. Unfortunately, the troops also shot many innocent citizens and helped themselves to a liberal share of the booty. Most of all, "Disaster!" is the story of people, ordinary or famous, who made their way through the chaos. The strong point of this book is less the revelation of a unified story than the interweaving of a collection of individual anecdotes. Enrico Caruso had canceled a performance in Naples due to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, only to perform in San Francisco the night before the earthquake. San Franciscans fled their homes, married and gave birth and did so many other things while their world crashed around them. Ultimately, San Francisco survived and rose like the Phoenix to create a city greater than any they had enjoyed before. Read, enjoy and be inspired.
Rating:
Summary: An Interesting, Anecdotal History
Review: "Disaster!" is an interesting, anecdotal account of the lives of those who lived through the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906. The characters are many, both major an minor. After all of the attention to the September 11 attacks, it is worthwhile to step back and take a look at a natural, and even more destructive, disaster. Among the major characters are Mayor Eugene Schmitz, Gen. Franklin Funston and Acting Fire Chief John Dougherty. Mayor Eugene Schmitz was a former concert violinist and concert conductor who had come to power at the head of the Union Labor Party. Although committed to the promotion of the cause of Labor, he used his power to direct graft to himself and his friends. In the earthquake he saw an opportunity to win support which might keep him out of a well deserved prison term. Gen. Franklin Funston, deputy commander of the army garrison at the Presidio, ordered his troops into the city to render assistance and to restore order. By force of his troops, Funston became, for a few days, the virtual dictator of San Francisco. Assistant Fire Chief John Dougherty succeeded to the head of the SFFD upon the death of Chief Dennis Sullivan early in the crisis. It was he who rallied the fire fighters through the four days of seemingly hopeless struggle against the all consuming fire. Amadeo Peter Gianini, founder of the Bank of Italy, which would, in time, become the current Bank of America, assured his place in history and the future of the Bank, by moving the vault contents to his home before the bank was destroyed by the fire. Although the earthquake did much of the damage, even more was done by the resulting fires. Fires started by upset stoves and broken gas pipes spread and merged until most of the city was in ashes. Hampered by lack of water due to water mains broken by the fire, the heroic fire department had little other than dynamite with which to fight the fire until its progress toward the shoreline and the arrival of naval fire fighting vessels made brine available. Police and troops used force and coercion to obtain the labor necessary to clear debris and render aid. Unfortunately, the troops also shot many innocent citizens and helped themselves to a liberal share of the booty. Most of all, "Disaster!" is the story of people, ordinary or famous, who made their way through the chaos. The strong point of this book is less the revelation of a unified story than the interweaving of a collection of individual anecdotes. Enrico Caruso had canceled a performance in Naples due to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, only to perform in San Francisco the night before the earthquake. San Franciscans fled their homes, married and gave birth and did so many other things while their world crashed around them. Ultimately, San Francisco survived and rose like the Phoenix to create a city greater than any they had enjoyed before. Read, enjoy and be inspired.
Rating: 
Summary: Informative but not Compelling
Review: "Disaster" was a disappointment for me, mainly because I'd greatly enjoyed two of author Dan Krzman's previous books, "Fatal Voyage," and "Left to Die," about the U.S.S. Indianapolis and U.S.S. Juneau disasters, respectively. Those books, in addition to being informative history, tell great stories. Alas, "Disatser" makes a similar attempt in the storytelling department but fails. The book contains plenty of facts and first hand accounts of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, but it is strangely disjointed. There are so many stories of numerous survivors interwoven together that individually they are hard to follow. And since the book checks in at a fairly brief 256 pages of text, each snippet of each story usually gets only a couple of paragraphs before moving on. Together, the stories blend into a rather shapeless mass that all start to sound alike. Kurzman would have been better served to tell his story from the larger perspective and using individual stories where they fit in. This approach served David McCullough extremely well in his excellnt "The Johnstown Flood," which serves as the ideal model for this type of book. Overall, if you are interested in the subject matter or are a disaster buff, this book should be worthwhile with the above caveats. If you are a casual reader, you may want to consider taking a pass on this one.
Rating:
Summary: Informative but not Compelling
Review: "Disaster" was a disappointment for me, mainly because I'd greatly enjoyed two of author Dan Krzman's previous books, "Fatal Voyage," and "Left to Die," about the U.S.S. Indianapolis and U.S.S. Juneau disasters, respectively. Those books, in addition to being informative history, tell great stories. Alas, "Disatser" makes a similar attempt in the storytelling department but fails. The book contains plenty of facts and first hand accounts of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, but it is strangely disjointed. There are so many stories of numerous survivors interwoven together that individually they are hard to follow. And since the book checks in at a fairly brief 256 pages of text, each snippet of each story usually gets only a couple of paragraphs before moving on. Together, the stories blend into a rather shapeless mass that all start to sound alike. Kurzman would have been better served to tell his story from the larger perspective and using individual stories where they fit in. This approach served David McCullough extremely well in his excellnt "The Johnstown Flood," which serves as the ideal model for this type of book. Overall, if you are interested in the subject matter or are a disaster buff, this book should be worthwhile with the above caveats. If you are a casual reader, you may want to consider taking a pass on this one.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Take on an Infamous Disaster
Review: As someone with a serious interest in the field of disasters, I try to read as many texts on the subject. With a frequently covered topic such as the San Francsico Earthquake, one tends to have low expectations if a new book can capture any additional information. I was pleasantly surprised by this book and extremely enjoyed it. Although some material was familiar, the writer tapped into areas I was unfamiliar with, despite having read much on the disaster. I highly recommend the book to those interested in the subject, which helps to bring a very human side to the tragedy and reveal new discoveries on this event. The quality stands up to other books by Mr. Kurzman.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Take on an Infamous Disaster
Review: As someone with a serious interest in the field of disasters, I try to read as many texts on the subject. With a frequently covered topic such as the San Francsico Earthquake, one tends to have low expectations if a new book can capture any additional information. I was pleasantly surprised by this book and extremely enjoyed it. Although some material was familiar, the writer tapped into areas I was unfamiliar with, despite having read much on the disaster. I highly recommend the book to those interested in the subject, which helps to bring a very human side to the tragedy and reveal new discoveries on this event. The quality stands up to other books by Mr. Kurzman.
Rating:
Summary: Disaster! Worth a read..but keep looking...
Review: Being a relatively new transplant to the Bay Area, I wanted to read up on my local history.. This book is relatively new & is full of many first-hand accounts of the great 1906 earthquake. While it's definitely worth a read, I would consider it not the difinitive history of the quake. Oftentimes the accounts seem to flow over each other like the jagged pieces of cobblestone that once was in the great city of SF 1906. I feel that there could have been so much more to this book.. and I was left thirsty for more.
Rating:
Summary: Disaster! Worth a read..but keep looking...
Review: Being a relatively new transplant to the Bay Area, I wanted to read up on my local history.. This book is relatively new & is full of many first-hand accounts of the great 1906 earthquake. While it's definitely worth a read, I would consider it not the difinitive history of the quake. Oftentimes the accounts seem to flow over each other like the jagged pieces of cobblestone that once was in the great city of SF 1906. I feel that there could have been so much more to this book.. and I was left thirsty for more.
Rating:
Summary: A quick and easy picture of the quake and fire...
Review: Disaster seems to want to be a lively, fiction-style approach to the events, but suffers from a lack of depth and from the absence of any usable central characters. So we don't quite get a point of view strong enough to paint a compelling subjective experience, nor enough depth and detail to create a strong objective study. Instead we land somewhere in between. Not a bad book, though some of the historic conclusions seem open to debate. It does have some nice little anecdotes, and can be read cover to cover in a light afternoon, so this might make a good overview or starting point for someone approaching the subject. Young readers would also find this handy. If you want to see this type of historical writing done well, pick up David McCullough's book about the Johnstown Flood.
Rating:
Summary: "A blazing red. . . a hot red, a consuming red"
Review: Disaster! is a well-written, fast-moving look at the experience of many lives (famous and otherwise) in the face of one of the greatest disasters in U.S. history. The book looks at the unconventional frontier spirit of California's greatest city of the time, spoiled by the graft and corruption of past business and political figures and the current administration of Mayor Schmitz and city boss Abraham Reuf, and tarnished in reputation by the red light districts of Barbary Coast among others, yet loved dearly by most of its residents. It would burn for 74 hours and then, after it burned itself out, mercilessly came the rain. The spirit of optimism was shaken by the experience, but was definitely not destroyed as the city celebrated its rebuilding only nine years later. The book reveals the good and the bad brought out of people by the disaster. As one witness stated, "I had a Catholic Priest kneel by me in the park...and prayed to the holy Father for relief for my pain and ease to my body. I saw a poor woman, barefoot, told to 'Go to Hell and be glad of it,' for asking for a glass of milk at a dairyman's wagon; she had in her arms a baby with its legs broken" (pg. 149). In many cases, the primitive frontier life returned to the Bay just following the quake. Some militiamen took Mayor Schmitz's proclamation that looters should be shot on sight to the extreme, killing many civilians for trivial matters. In other cases, neighbors of different ethnic and social groups came together-made equal by their loss. One survivor's memory of a free spree at a candy store before it was to be dynamited in an attempt to stop the fire's path carried with him eighty years (pg. 138). The people whose stories are told include a 10-year old future Major League pitcher who searches frantically for the love of his life; a couple separated and presumed dead by neighbors yet never giving up the search for each other; another couple who insisted on going ahead with their wedding plans despite the chaos around them; the renown prima donna tenor Enrico Caruso who thought he had avoided disaster by postponing plans to go to Naples just before the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius; Mayor Schmitz who the very day of the earthquake was to go to a hearing for a case of corruption against him; the head of the Bank of Italy (later the Bank of America) risking life and limb to save his customer's deposits from his doomed building-the list goes on. The stories are told sporadically in 41 short chapters (some as short as three pages). Some of the stories are almost too spread out. The story of actor John Barrymore's experience, for example, was introduced on page 13 and did not continue until page 166. This style makes it a little difficult to follow at times, but I think it is still better than completing one story and then moving on to the next making the book painfully redundant. Each story is unique enough to jog the memory after a few lines. The book has source notes, a list of people whose experiences are described, a map of the San Francisco area, and a lengthy bibliography. I enjoyed reading this book and recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.
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