If You Lived at the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake by Ellen Levine (1988)

Another great offering by Scholastic for my adventures through the turn-of-the-century, this book answers most of the questions anyone might have about the San Francisco disaster of 1906. Having just completed the Scholastic book I Survived the San Francisco Earthquake, 1906, I knew there was some key, factual info I still lacked. Thankfully I also had this book on my shelf, so I now feel as educated as I’ll ever need to be.

In fact, as I read this book, I kept thinking about how the I Survived author must have used this book for partial inspiration and education. Specifically I think of those early-morning howling dogs who had felt the vibrations deep in the earth before the quake ever struck. I think of the tent cities and bread lines that the survivors and refugees had to endure. Interesting little tidbits like these from this nonfiction book certainly helped make the novel come alive, and more power to the author for doing her due diligence!

Whether Tarshis used this book as a resource tool or not, it certainly could serve any author well who desires to capture the terrors of this century-old tragedy. It’s filled with anecdotes that readers might not find elsewhere, so while I might not call it “an invaluable resource,” I’d at least call it “a really helpful summary.”

I especially enjoyed the layout of this book, a series of twenty-four questions that really get to the heart of the quake and its impact on the community. For example, the author asks about the death toll, about rescue stories, and about where people lived and cooked and shopped after the fires were finally put out. Levine covers virtually every question a person might have about the tragedy, and Scholastic did well to update her prose in 1992 with detailed watercolors and in 2004 with a new world-map of all the worst earthquakes to have occurred since 1906.

This book is a very helpful and interesting guide to an important event in American history. It’s broken down into specific questions that a teacher could easily adapt into a classroom discussion or homework assignment. Personally, I plan to keep this book as a reference for my own children, and I hope to assign both this and the I Survived book as research material for their own fictional account of how they might have survived the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

In reading these books about an event 114 years past, I can’t help but think how such a tragedy would impact Americans today, as we suffer through COVID-19, rampant riots and violent protests, international instability, and the threat of locusts to boot. Could we handle a natural disaster to the scale of the 1906 quake? Would America survive such a tragedy? It’s hard to consider, but that’s the beauty of a book like this: it at least allows us to entertain the questions!

I don’t know if this book is part of a series or not, but if it is, I will certainly remain on the lookout for its companions. I really enjoyed this Q&A study of an historical American event, and I recommend it to parents and teachers alike.

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