California is suddenly rocked from top to bottom by two catastrophic earthquakes that bring the state to its knees. These are the gripping stories of a handful of struggling survivors and their life and death experiences. You’ll be spellbound on the edge of your seat every step of the way. Situations include people trapped in a dangling Palm Springs tram car, a collapsed Disneyland roller coaster ride, and deadly wild fires raging out of control and burning everything in their path. Streets are buckled and impassable, and vital utilities all shut down indefinitely. Untold numbers of people are trapped in the rubble of toppled buildings. Families are separated and later reunited. Fortunes are made while others such as generations of real estate holdings are wiped out. The cast of colorful characters includes an eccentric attorney and his terrified trophy wife, a doctor sadly widowed by the earthquake, a pair of young newlyweds who suffer a tragic death, a family on vacation thrust into the struggle of their lives, a devious bank teller turned bank thief, a high school hockey team turned heroes and saviors, and many more.

On the day two people finally find true love together, California Collapses into civil war. Cut off from the rest of the United States and Mexico by closed boarders and massive death, the couple attempt to elude the mayhem. Martin is an ex-Marine of exemplary service who just can't seem to have civilian life go his way. Accident prone yet good natured, Martin finds his true soul mate in Mary, an elite hacker and mechanical genius. Together they see their future, if only they can escape California to live it.

The journal seems to contain information for everyone regardless of one's interest...Each page of this almost six hundred page journal is crammed with facts and descriptions. So much of interest is contained in every entry that each re-reading will reveal many interesting incidents or observations not quite grasped on the first perusal....This book will be a valuable source to all students of California or United States history and to the casual readers as well.

At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults. The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect—in the gold disruptions of the nineteenth century no less than in the earthquakes of the twentieth—and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California. McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.