A Crack in the Edge of the World, by Simon Winchester

Pro:

• Every story homes in on the telling detail
• Personal approach brings many subjects to life
• Impressionistic presentation is kind to casual readers
• Fair introduction to modern geology in its broadest outlines

• Acrobatic writing style can be exasperating, occasionally fatuous
• Treatments of many subjects are unreliable in the details
• Sprawling, mazelike structure has little momentum
• An assemblage of book fragments rather than a sustained narrative

• Leisurely telling of basic tectonic theory loosely tied to 1906 earthquake centennial
• Enlivened with personal travels and encounters from Iceland to the Pacific, Alaska to Mexico
• Appetizing introduction to some of America's most interesting geology
• Gripping outline of events surrounding 1906 quake

Simon Winchester has earned a reputation for breathing life into obscure matters, and over the years he has grown a voice. His recent books on geology (his college major in the mid-1960s) have been well rewarded, and given the portents and coincidences he recounts during the writing of this book, the topic seems preordained. He intends to make the great 1906 California earthquake his own.

Winchester sets out in garrulous full cry. Starting his prologue at a Web site for Neil Armstrong's home town, his train of thought leaps to outer space, where planet Earth was first laid out in full view for all mankind. He skips from there briefly to Gaia theory, which holds that Earth is an organism: "it seems right to tell the story of the events that so ruined the city of San Francisco in 1906 within the context of the Gaia idea."

False alarm; Gaia and her context never reappear. No, the context is instead plate tectonics, part of the New Geology (his capitals), which unlike the Old Geology of fossils in drawers and "cracked-varnish wall roller charts showing how the world may have looked at the time of the Permian Period," is instead "a creature fashioned wholly from the science of the space age, from the attitude that was born when Neil Armstrong first looked back and gazed at the earth."

The trouble with this outburst is that it's false. Every significant element of plate tectonics arose from study and speculation that long preceded the space program. The "new geology" was, in point of fact, a creature fashioned wholly without space-age science. Even the whole-earth attitude Winchester alludes to dates to Alfred Wegener a century ago. He knows this, and later fills in some of that hundred years of progress—but too much he loves a splendid-sounding line. That's why "A Crack in the Edge of the World," with this and a hundred other small fatuities, is not a book for scientists of any kind.

And yet the gist of his statement, and of this whole book, is that geology is a lively, dramatic and very human science. The author's travelogue, touching Iceland, California, Alaska and the American west, loosely binds the wandering tale with an exuberant touch of road fever. Winchester's recounting of the 1906 earthquake itself, which starts in earnest around page 200, is an impressive compendium of highlights plucked from many previous books. While nourishment is to be had from Winchester's fertile mind, the whole is like a meal of tapas and desserts without much of a main course. "A Crack in the Edge of the World" is a bumptious, high-falutin yarn that will lose its nine-days wonder gleam after 2006's centennial.

The last words in Winchester's voice, just before the bibliography, really should be on page 1: "Caveat lector"—reader beware. Much about the book is entertaining, but it should not be mistaken for more. For a dedicated study of the quake, Philip Fradkin's new "Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906" is far more satisfying and original, and for a definitive introduction to geology Old and New, John McPhee set the standard with "Annals of the Former World." Both are good for a lifetime's rereading.