The Last Day
Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 was no run-of-the-mill misfortune-it was a watershed moment that shook the pillars of an inveterate social order and sent reverberations throughout the Western world. Earth, water, wind, and fire all conspired to produce a hellish catastrophe that lasted for a full five days and left Lisbon thoroughly annihilated. Nicholas Shrady's unique account of this first modern disaster and its aftereffects successfully articulates the outcome of the earthquake-the eighteenth-century equivalent of a mass media frenzy giving rise to a host of other fascinating developments, such as disaster preparedness, landmark social reform, urban planning, and the birth of seismology.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 exerted a great cultural, religious and political impact, argues Shrady (Tilt: A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa) in this revelatory volume. On November 1 (both a Sunday and All Saints' Day) at 9:30 a.m., a titanic earthquake shattered the quiet, turning the pious city's packed houses of worship into crypts as their walls collapsed. Five days of firestorms consumed the buildings left standing and a tsunami drowned the benighted survivors who escaped toward the ocean. As Shrady deftly details, Europe was stunned by the merciless destruction of one of the continent's most opulent cities. Leading intellectual and philosophical figures Voltaire, Rousseau, Pope, Goethe and Kant, among others became fascinated by the question of divine intervention in human affairs. Lisbon, still home to the Inquisition, had been immolated: was this evidence of God's wrath or of God's nonexistence? The latter interpretation soon found its way into Voltaire's cynical, secularist Enlightenment masterpiece, Candide. Within the decade, scholars had created the new discipline of seismology, and governments were taking their first faltering steps toward urban planning and disaster control. Shrady's account will find the same ready audience that delight not only in tales of catastrophe but in smart, stylishly written history.
