"Davies uses the 1906 disaster as a lens through which to ask hard questions about the social and political life of San Francisco. She successfully weaves together the intricate stories of ordinary people's struggles and daily lives with high politics, urban history, and analyses of race, class, and gender. Important, smart, and crisply written, Saving San Francisco is both forceful and lively, and Davies's Epilogue about master disaster narratives is a graceful, moving close to what will become 'the' book on this subject for years to come." - Barbara Berglund, Associate Professor of History at the University of South Florida and author of Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906 "Saving San Francisco makes an original contribution to San Francisco history and to the study of how cities respond to natural disasters. Davies has written the first systematic social and political history of the recovery efforts after the earthquake and fire of 1906. Using a rich variety of archival evidence, including an excellent selection of personal stories, she contributes to both social welfare and Progressive Era scholarship. This is a convincing revisionist account that shows how the recovery process was shaped by existing gender, class, and racial fault lines in San Francisco society." -William Issel, Professor of History Emeritus at San Francisco State University and coauthor (with Robert W. Cherny) of San Francisco, 1865-1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development
