The first section provides a succinct, trenchant retelling of California's environmental history, from the era of Father Junipero Serra's mission system up to our own Bayshore Freeway - which replaced part of Serra's old Camino Real, and rests on land that 'would once have been a mile out from shore.' The middle chapter sets out in readily understandable language the fundamentals of plate tectonics, the seismological theory first suggested by Scottish philosopher Thomas Dick in the 19th century, and still dismissed as quackery as recently as 40 years ago. It's a measure of the lumpy shape Reisner left the manuscript in that its three chapters run roughly 50, 25 and 100 pages, and have no names. Reisner died of cancer 2 1/2 years ago, but he left behind 'A Dangerous Place,' a cruelly truncated stump of a book that nevertheless helps explain the seismic haymaker slowly gathering strength enough to floor us all. 'A Dangerous Place' is the last public testament of the late Marc Reisner, whose landmark book ' Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water' should continue to shape debate about the West's future for as long as people are fool enough to live here. But a sobering new book has just arrived that should scare every living Californian silly - and it was written by one of our own. Most Californians have had a bellyful of hearing how unnatural it is to live here, coming as it usually does from people who spend half the year putting on six layers of clothing just to fetch the morning paper. What if the pioneers had settled America from west to east - from California toward the Atlantic - instead of the other way around? Just for starters, we'd probably see way more statistics calculating the economic destructiveness of nature's most underestimated act of God: winter.

Cadillac desert book review