The Longest Minute: The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 -- Matthew J. Davenport, Hardcover

Matthew J. Davenport's The Longest Minute is the spellbinding true story of the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco, and how a great earthquake sparked a devastating and preventable firestorm.

At 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck San Francisco, catching most of the city asleep. For approximately one minute, shockwaves buckled streets, shattered water mains, collapsed buildings, crushed hundreds of residents to death and trapped many alive. Fires ignited and blazed through dry wooden ruins and grew into a firestorm. For the next three days, flames devoured collapsed ruins, killed trapped survivors, and nearly destroyed what was then the largest city in the American West.

Meticulously researched and gracefully written, The Longest Minute is both a harrowing chronicle of devastation and the portrait of a city's resilience in the burning aftermath of greed and folly. Drawing on the letters and diaries and unpublished memoirs of survivors and previously unearthed archival records, Matthew Davenport combines history and science to tell the dramatic true story of one of the greatest disasters in American history.

Author: Matthew J. Davenport
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 10/17/2023
Pages: 448
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.55lbs
Size: 9.48h x 6.70w x 1.19d
ISBN: 9781250279279

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 05/01/2023 pg. 19
Booklist 10/01/2023 pg. 17

About the Author

Matthew Davenport's first book, First Over There, a finalist for the 2015 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, was acclaimed as "a brilliant work for every library" by Library Journal and was heralded by Pulitzer-Prize winning historian James McPherson as "military history at its best." His forthcoming book, The Longest Minute, the gripping, true story of the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco, is scheduled for release from St. Martin's Press in Fall 2023.

Matthew Davenport has been a contributing writer for the Wall Street Journal Book Review and salon.com and is a member of the Authors Guild. A native of Missouri and a former prosecutor, he practices law in North Carolina where he lives with his wife and two sons.