Sunday, as I was browsing my friendly neighborhood megabookstore, to my very great surprise I came across a new book by Marc Reisner, author of Cadillac Desert. Although Mr. Reisner died in 2000, Pantheon has just released A Dangerous Place, a short book about the dangers of earthquakes to Los Angeles and the Bay Area. The first chapters seem to have been slapped together a little roughly, and go over material covered extensively in Cadillac Desert, but the last part of the book is compelling, scary, and a little bit creepy. Reisner imagines a large (but not worst-case) earthquake along the Hayward fault in the East Bay, in early 2005. Somewhat disturbingly, he seems to put himself into the middle of the action. As one reads the actions that our narrator takes as he locates his daughters on their way home from school, and then later motorboats across the bay to pick up his wife in San Francisco (many of the bridges are closed or partially destroyed), one can't help but recall that this is a man almost three years dead telling a story about himself two years hence.

It's a slight book, by no means as exhaustive as Cadillac Desert, or even the out-of-print and oft-overlooked Game Wars. But as an unexpected last work by an author I had thought forever silenced, A Dangerous Place is a most welcome gift.