On The Shelf

Predicting earthquakes is still beyond the achievement of modern science. But each time the earth moves, individuals and governments pick through the rubble for lessons for the future and connects with the past. Two books that illustrate this best, one a history of an event a century ago, and the other a fictional response to a big one two decades ago:

A Crack in the Edge of the World
By Simon Winchester
Winchester is already a master at reconstructing catastrophe. After profiling the earthquake at Kratatoa that set off the great tsumani, he now turns to San Francisco. In the early hours of April 18, 1906, California was struck by a massive quake and it is said that fires raged for three days thereafter.

After the Quake
By Haruki Murakami
For Japan, 1995 was an unsettling year. Members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult organised a sarin attack on Tokyo8217;s underground, and the Kobe earthquake jolted the country into rethinking its disaster management set-up. Murakami reacted to both. He conducted extensive interviews with sarin attack survivors to know how that experience changed them. And he published a slim collection of short stories, After the Quake, to insinuate that Kobe event into lives lived elsewhere.