The Longest Minute

May 1, 2023

It actually took less than a minute, but the earthquake that struck San Francisco on April 18, 1906, devastated the largest city in the Western United States. Drawing on letters, diaries, unpublished memoirs, and newly discovered archives, plus interviews with engineers and geologists, litigation attorney Davenport, author of the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize finalist First Over There, reconstructs what happened. With a 40,000-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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October 1, 2023
Davenport brings fresh insights to the 1906 earthquake and devastating, citywide fires in San Francisco. He demonstrates that improvisation played a key role in the response to the disaster, with water scarce and local news outlets paralyzed. The damages had much more painful repercussions for those on the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder: immigrants and impoverished residents were incinerated in cheap, wooden tenements. The same hubris, sloppiness, and lack of foresight that worsened the city's destruction were essentially duplicated when it came time to rebuild. City leaders' efforts to revamp San Francisco meant that quality was considered a subsidiary concern to speed, when in fact it should've been paramount. Developers viewed the city as a tabula rasa, and Davenport laments that sustainability and safety were "again left to market forces." Chinese and Japanese immigrants were unfairly scapegoated, culminating in the 1924 passage of the Asian Exclusion Act. The disaster also seemed to seal the fate of Hetch Hetchy Valley, which was dammed to provide a reliable water supply to the San Francisco Bay Area. A tale both captivating and cautionary.

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Starred review from November 13, 2023
Historian Davenport (First Over There) provides a terrifying and propulsive account of the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Drawing on hundreds of firsthand accounts, court transcripts, and official reports, Davenport outlines the treacherous blow-by-blow of the destruction caused by the 7.9 magnitude quake, which struck at 5:12 a.m. and caught most residents in their beds, as well as the three-day firestorm that followed, both of which combined killed more than 3,000 people and left a quarter million homeless. Ten percent of the U.S. Armed Forces played a role in the response, and more than 300,000 passengers were evacuated by train and ferry to refugee camps in surrounding communities. In what proved to be among the earliest of such partnerships, federal aid and private largesse combined to an unprecedented extent to help the hundreds of thousands of those in need. Davenport seamlessly weaves detailed technical explanations of city infrastructure (the failure of the water mains and the composition of buildings worsened the fire) into gut-churning scenes, often drawing from primary sources to harrowing effect (“Legs and arms were sticking out here and there to guide us,” wrote one rescue worker of his efforts to uncover bodies from the rubble). It’s a vivid and meticulous recounting of one of America’s largest natural disasters.