Rating: 
Summary: A feast for the senses
Review: James Dalessandro has written an enthralling story that vividly captures the reader's imagination. The glamour and bawdy, the squalor and the degredation, the honest and the unscrupulous--all the elements that made up one of the most gilded cities in the Victorian world: San Francisco.The earthquake and fire are almost like minor characters in the book, pitting their fury against the embattled citizens of this doomed city. From its birth miles out in the Pacific, the earthquake pulls the reader along as it rips through the sea and ground, almost as if you are seeing the destruction through its eyes. The reader feels the intense heat of the fires that rage through the fractured city, sucking every last drop of moisture from man and beast. Set against such a background, the characters bring to life a story of murder and corruption. Yes, you hiss the villians and cheer the heroes. But all this keeps you turning the pages until the exciting conclusion. If you like fast-paced thrillers, pick up "1906." If you have a fondness for that city by the bay, you'll enjoy this trip back to the time when San Francisco was the jewel of the Pacific.
Rating: 
Summary: Overly ambitous and falls short
Review: Many of the Amazon "reviews" of this book either must be the author himself, or some of his cronies. I find it impossible that all of these people agree this a 5-star book. Also notice how many sound suspiciously like advertisements...a dead giveaway!! Now let me give you an impartial review. This is a story with great potential that suffers from poor writing and and over-ambitious plot. First of all, it could have used better editing. Allesandro seems to find a word he likes and keeps repeating it frequently (ie. the word 'flirtatious' three times in less than two pages). The author is a man who choses to write the book as if he were the first person woman...which does not really succeed. Even though our heroine narrator is female, some of her personality and actions are decidedly unfemale: lacking in the emotion a woman would really feel. Then there is the plot. In the first 1/4 of the book we are introduced to what seems like 60 different characters. Each chapter brings a whole new story line with way too many character descriptions...especially when the character ends up playing a minor (if any) role in the story. I found myself turning back several pages to remind myself who each character was, who they were related to, etc. which made for very frustrating reading. I could also not help but think this was a "written for a movie" book. You can almost smell the author's desperation to make this into a screenplay. There are certainly some good action moments throughout the book, but I ended up feeling more annoyed than entertained by the time I finished the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Fire and Brimstone
Review: Mr. Dalessandro writes about San Francisco's 1906 quake and its linked political corruption so masterfully that I instantly saw the fault lines above ground and below. Here are city fathers who make Boss Tweed look like a Boy Scout, an infrastructure gone to hell, and a disaster waiting to happen. Dalessandro knows the city inside out, and the narrative integrates the massive quake with the politics by using a first person voice - a newspaper woman of the day - who invisibly slips offstage when omniscience is needed. The quake and its progress through the city on multiple fronts, the fires, explosions, and mass death, the local color and the dumb decisions which made it all worse, all show a research effort which must have required a war room to orchestrate.
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Rating:
Summary: A thrilling read with refreshing style
Review: One thing I must say about this book is, in terms of suspense, wow! 1906 really has it. It was so good that I've given it to several people. My poor husband though, started reading it at 11 p.m. (on a work night) to help him fall asleep, and he couldn't put it down! He was up until the wee hours until he finished it. But I couldn't feel too guilty because he LOVED it and said it was worth the sleepy eyes at work the next day.
Somehow, in the prologue, the author managed to tell the end of the story without revealing how it turned out for the main character. So, right from there, I was devouring the book to see how it was going to turn out for her. Let's just say that I wasn't disappointed when I did get to the end!
I personally really like the author's style. He doesn't give you too much internal thinking or authorial/narrative background. Instead, I felt that I was in the action of the story at all times, my heart pounding as I faced the twin, mounting perils of the impending earthquake and the confrontation of the city's crime boss and henchmen. A great writer (Ray Bradbury) once said "Don't just tell me they were in love, PROVE it!" Even the love story had suspense, threatened at every turn by the dangers that mounted to an almost unbelievable level. I fell in love through the main character's eyes -- I was in her shoes, seeing what she was seeing and feeling her feelings as they grew.
It's hard, I think, to convey the terror, pain, and destruction of something as enormously devastating as that earthquake, to capture the heartbreak of exploitation from the eyes of a victim, and to paint the big picture of rampant corruption. Because I could identify with each of the characters Mr. Dalessandro portrayed, I felt and experienced all of it, while still having that thread of hope and human decency so delicately woven by the author to buoy me.
I was truly enriched by this presentation of a history of a city I lived in for ten years and of people whose names I only knew because of the streets, parks, and schools that I've passed for years without knowing the history behind them. To be so enriched while also entertained, is truly a gift.
My accolades to the author for a great achievement and my highest recommendation to Amazon readers!
Rating:
Summary: Much of a Muchness
Review: The 1906 San Francisco earthquake was so strong that I knocked Bay Area seismographs off their stands or registered off the scale. The shocks were felt from south of Los Angeles to central Oregon. Fires turned the city into an inferno for four days, and almost a hundred years later, the number of people killed remains unknown. With all this going on, it is hard to imagine a book in which the San Francisco earthquake is almost as an anticlimax, but here it is. "1906" is so busy with overwrought plot that the earthquake pales in comparison to the melodramatic goings-on. I won't even go into the story. I was hoping for something like "Paradise Alley" or "Banished Children of Eve" which explored the effect of a large and tragic event on a range of characters, giving the reader insight into the event, the time period, and the way people reacted to both, all the while offering a whale of a good read. Alas, not here. An excellent opportunity was tossed aside and replaced with a lot of bad-movie clutter. I did like was the treatment of the Enrico Caruso phenomenon. San Francisco had gone crazy for the great tenor, who was in town to sing Don Jose in "Carmen." People from miles away had crowded into San Francisco for a glimpse of the cheerful Italian who was probably the most famous man in the world at that time. This good-natured trouper with a voice blessed by God and his feet firmly on the ground uncomplainingly traveled to the remotest parts of the globe to perform, but of San Francisco he said, "Hell of a place. I never sing here again." "1906" has "movie treatment" written all over it, and indeed, it seems to have been optioned by a film company already. With the centenary of the earthquake only two years away, I'm still waiting for the novel that will pin that moment in history.
Rating:
Summary: Captured by the first sentence...
Review: The moment I read the well crafted first sentence of 1906, I was hooked. Dalessandro has complete control of his craft, and molds the setting, characters and history into a rich, fascinating tale.
The back-story of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake takes on a personal tale of corruption, greed and treachery otherwise buried in the rubble of bricks and inferno of fire.
As a professional researcher, I have great respect for the detail and historical accuracy Dalessandro put into this momentous of tasks. I know the time and energy it takes to dig out the tiniest of gems that take historical fiction from the level of average to height of exceptional.
This book is exceptional. 1906 is one of the rare books I could not put down, and spent every spare moment buried in the plot.
I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: A Bay area native guages a 'shaking' novel....
Review: This book was a bit of a disappointment. I think I expected too much. I knew it was a novel, but the way the information was presented really threw me for a curve. The novel is supposed to be written in first person narrative, but it kept going back and forth between that narrative and the author slipping into third person about events the person speaking would not experience first hand. Maybe I am nitpicking here.
The book did whet my interest again into the 1906 earthquake, as regards correct history and the science behind it. If readers want to see something really scary look at the seismograms taken of the 1906 earthquake in comparison to the Loma Linda earthquake in Germany at [...]. That's very concerning especially when you consider all the building and population growth in this area.
So the book was fairly enjoyable, if light, reading, and it did make me go look up some things and get some more books on this...which I am sure is not what the author intended, but oh well...
Karen Sadler
Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Portrayal of a Horrific Disaster
Review: This splendid book about a spectacular calamity is one of the most invigorating "reads" I've encountered in years. James Dalessandro mixes the ugly hard facts about San Francisco's brutal political corruption of the early 1900s with some savvy and hardbitten fiction that serves to personalize and enhance this tale of a disaster that few of us know enough about.
The author's smooth blend of reality and dramatic license will both thrill and repel you-- and apparently that's precisely what the author intended.
And astonishingly, smack-dab in the middle of this frightening tale, Dalessandro offers up a loving, tender portrait of Enrico Caruso, the brilliant Italian tenor who visits San Francsico for a performance just before the quake. This Caruso is a sweet, cheerful, down-to-earth Neapolitan who just might have been the world's most famous person at that time. In Dalessandro's depiction, you can't help falling in love with the man.
But the Caruso sidebar is just one of many delightful aspects of "1906" that'll have you mesmerized as you peruse this sensational treat of a book. Stand by for the sequel; it's already in Dalessandro's sights.
Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Portrayal of a Horrific Disaster
Review: This splendid book about a spectacular calamity is one of the most invigorating "reads" I've encountered in years. James Dalessandro mixes the ugly hard facts about San Francisco's brutal political corruption of the early 1900s with some savvy and hardbitten fiction that serves to personalize and enhance this tale of a disaster that few of us know enough about.
The author's smooth blend of reality and dramatic license will both thrill and repel you-- and apparently that's precisely what the author intended.
And astonishingly, smack-dab in the middle of this frightening tale, Dalessandro offers up a loving, tender portrait of Enrico Caruso, the brilliant Italian tenor who visits San Francsico for a performance just before the quake. This Caruso is a sweet, cheerful, down-to-earth Neapolitan who just might have been the world's most famous person at that time. In Dalessandro's depiction, you can't help falling in love with the man.
But the Caruso sidebar is just one of many delightful aspects of "1906" that'll have you mesmerized as you peruse this sensational treat of a book. Stand by for the sequel; it's already in Dalessandro's sights.
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