About this item
Matthew J. Davenport's The Longest Minute is the spellbinding true story of the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco, and how a great earthquake sparked a devastating and preventable firestorm.At 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck San Francisco, catching most of the city asleep. For approximately one minute, shockwaves buckled streets, shattered water mains, collapsed buildings, crushed hundreds of residents to death and trapped many alive. Fires ignited and blazed through dry wooden ruins and grew into a firestorm. For the next three days, flames devoured collapsed ruins, killed trapped survivors, and nearly destroyed what was then the largest city in the American West.. Meticulously researched and gracefully written, The Longest Minute is both a harrowing chronicle of devastation and the portrait of a city's resilience in the burning aftermath of greed and folly.
About the Author
In an effort to tell of the American experience in the First World War, Matthew Davenport has dug through archives and family collections coast to coast to consult the letters, diaries, reports, and memoirs of the doughboys who served at the front. His book, "First Over There," which tells the story of the first American victory in the trenches of the Western Front, was a finalist for the 2015 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History and has been heralded by Pulitzer-Prize winning historian James McPherson as "military history at its best."
Matthew Davenport served in the US Army Reserve, is a member of the American Legion, and was the recipient of the Daughters of the American Revolution 2017 Medal of Honor. A native of St. Louis and a former prosecutor, he practices law in eastern North Carolina where he teaches at East Carolina University and lives with his wife and two sons.
