Magnitude 8

"Magnitude 8 is likely the most thoroughly researched volume available for a lay audience about the San Andreas Fault." —Minal Hajratwala, San Jose Mercury News

Magnitude 8 is the archetypal natural disaster defined. To understand the cataclysmic earthquake that will tear California apart one day, Philip L. Fradkin has written a dramatic history of earthquakes and an eloquent guide to the San Andreas Fault, the world's best-known tectonic landscape. The author includes vivid stories of earthquakes elsewhere: in New England, the central Mississippi River Valley, New York City, Europe, and the Far East. Always, he combines human and natural drama to place the reader at the epicenter of the most instantaneous and unpredictable of all the Earth's phenomena. Following the San Andreas Fault from Cape Mecino to Mexico—canoeing the fault line in northern California and walking underground through the Hollywood fault—noted environmental historian Philip L. Fradkin reclaims the human dimensions of earthquakes from the science-dominated accounts.

"This superb cautionary tale should be required reading for every Californian. (And smug New Yorkers will be shocked by Fradkin's surprising account of their own seismic vulnerability.)" —Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz

"A fascinating and at times riveting yarn about one of the state's—and the earth's—most powerful and mysterious forces . . . [Fradkin] puts California's seismic adventure in context by tracing the history, mythology and literature of earthquakes worldwide, peppering his account with quake references from Shakespeare, Voltaire and the Yurok Indians of the Northwest." —Jim Doyle, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review