Simon Winchester vividly brings to life the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion, and fashions an enthralling and informative look at the tumultuous subterranean world that produces earthquakes, the planet's most sudden and destructive force. Winchester applies his inimitable storytelling abilities (as well as his understanding of geology) to this extraordinary event, exploring not only what happened in northern California in 1906 but what we have learned since about the geological underpinnings that caused the earthquake in the first place. But his achievement is even greater: he positions the quake's significance along the earth's geological timeline and shows the effect it had on the rest of 20th-century California and American history. [from the flyleaf: "This signed edition of A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester has been specially bound by the publisher."] The dust jacket of this edition folds out into a large poster-sized facsimile of the front page of a San Francisco newspaper published on April 19, 1906.