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(More customer reviews)It might be highly unusual for a supposed "competitor" to review the work of a contemporary, but seeing that only one person on Amazon has bothered to review Dennis Smith's compelling new book, "San Francisco Burning," I thought it incumbent to offer praise where it is richly deserved. For that past three decades -- ever since the first defintive text, Thomas/Witt's "The San Francisco Earthquake" and Gladys Hansen's unparalleled "Denial of Disaster" first appeared -- every writer on the subject of the great earthquake and fire has claimed to have the "untold" story and discovered some "breakthrough" evidence. It hasn't happened. But what Dennis Smith has achieved here is remarkable for its insight and observation. More than any other book, perhaps, Smith has identified the true heroes and villains of the 1906 earthquake. There were actually two disasters: nature's earthquake and humankind's raging inferno. Smith, a former N.Y. firefighter who wrote the marvelous "Report from Ground Zero", takes a street-level, in-the-trenches view of what occured. He adroitly argues that the true hero was Lt. Frederick Freeman of the U.S. Navy, who led a hundred sailors on Navy Tugboats in a desperate, three day struggle to save the waterfront and the trains station, the two locations which evacuated 300,000 people in just 72 hours. Smith puts the final dagger into the two former sacred cows of the disaster: the monstrously corrupt and incompetent Mayor Eugene Schmitz, and the almost pathologically intractable Brig. General Frederic Funston. While the Navy devoted itself to aiding the fire fight, Mayor Schmitz thought it more important to protect property -- property about to burn -- and issued a "Shoot To Kill" order to thousands of soldiers, National Guardsmen, and "Special Police" who were merely vigilantes. Schmitz and Funston's idea of protecting order and property was to shoot scores of citizens "suspected" of commiting any kind of crime, including several people carrying their own goods or attempting to aid the wounded, and using dynamite to try to blast fire breaks on wood frame buildings. The blasting -- 90% of which, according to Smith, was done with highly flammable granulated dynamite, black powder and gun cotton -- started hundreds of fires and destroyed sections of the city that would have likely escaped the conflagration. Smith's book is not perfect: the main criticism is that when he gets a full head of steam and is building marvelous dramatic momentum, he stops to give us history and biography lessons. This is especially glaring when, during a powerful dissertation on the events of Wed., April 18, he jumps ahead to tell us what happens to city officials much later, deflating his own momentum. Re-engaging that level of drama is not easy. Some wise editing could have made this book shine even more brightly. But Smith's powerful and fearless analysis, that the Navy achieved brilliantly and the Army -- in the issues that mattered most -- failed miserably, lends testimony to the inviolable concept that one man, one leader, can make a difference. And in his greatest analysis, Smith perceives what others of us have long shared: that it was the brilliant, visionary fire chief, Dennis Sullivan, the man who had fought the thieves at City Hall to spend money on fire prevention, the man who had a plan that might have saved many lives and much property, the man whose loss was the most catastrophic event after the earthquake itself. Sullivan would never have let fools spread the fire with the improper use of dynamite. Dennis Sullivan, a hydraulic engineer, would have concentrated on tapping every avaialbe source of water, and directing citizens, soldiers, sailors and marines into combatting the fire, with law & order left in the hands of police. Anyone who has ever vigorously studied Dennis Sullivan realizes that he, more than anyone, was prepared for that moment. Bravo, Dennis Smith: your book is the best written in the last 15 years on this subject, and your conclusions and scholarship are superb. You have joined a very small, select group who truly understands what happened in that awful week in April of 1906. James Dalessandro, author, 1906: A Novel.
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