| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.4

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

California Earthquakes: Science, Risk, and the Politics of Hazard Mitigation. By Carl-Henry Geschwind. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2001. x + 337 pp. Notes, bibliographical essay, index. $45.00.)

That California has a Seismic Safety Commission, responsible for establishing and enforcing seismic engineering and geology codes, and that the federal government has supported a wide-ranging (if under-funded) program of earthquake research, would likely be of little surprise to a well-informed citizen of California. How this came to be from 1906 to 1977 is the topic of Carl-Henry Geschwind's thorough and well-documented study of the history of earthquakes in California. The book documents the development of the scientific understanding of California earthquakes and examines the evolution of the "regulatory-state" apparatus of enforcing an ever increasingly strict set of building codes in the state. Geschwind adeptly leads the reader from the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the nascent science of seismology, and examines how science and commercial interests clashed over safety regulations sixty years before Ronald Regan became governor. . . .

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