Shaken Allegiances: Two Days from the Continuum of NonsenseBruneauMichel2009. CePages Press, East Amherst, New York, 412 pp., $15

In most books written by earthquake engineering professors, the theme is illustrated with equations that are accompanied by explanations of fault rupture and ground motion, dynamic response and building performance. In this well-written book by Professor Bruneau, the theme is illustrated by fictional characters who are accompanied by scenes of an earthquake disaster and the surreal level of incompetence and pettiness with which they respond to it. Most earthquake engineers write their books with dry, third-person diction. Bruneau wrote this book with a combination of blunt first-person language spoken by the novel’s characters and well-crafted narrative sentences that include such picturesque metaphors as “violent trespasser” (the earthquake that suddenly enters your house and trashes it), or the way a warehouse littered with debris looks like “the bedroom of some giant teenager.” He portrays the perception of a person undergoing the earthquake in a way that you will recognize as quite accurate, if you have ever undergone one: “seconds and inches became minutes and feet.” The magnitude 7 earthquake that sets the plot in motion hits Montreal with bull’s eye accuracy right under the city, disabling all the bridges across the rivers that surround and divide it. Over 3.5 million people live in that urban region. Without giving away any of the plot, we can say that by the end of the book, the population is reduced by over 1,000—a plausible loss estimate for this scenario and one that certainly isn’t sensationalist. The earthquake devastation—collapsed or uninhabitable buildings, hazardous material releases and fires, disabled emergency services facilities—happens in the midst of forty-below weather. Conveniently, −40° is the one spot on the temperature scales where Celsius and Fahrenheit temperatures match, so readers in the United States, as well as those familiar with metric units (the latter also known as “the rest of the world”), will quickly understand how lethal that weather is in a city with no utility services intact. One need not know French to follow the plot and dialogue, though the frequent use of Quebecois swear words is a treat reserved only for those who do. (My high school French classes failed to cover that vocabulary, so I had to look them up; as foreign-language phrases in this Englishlanguage book, they are conveniently italicized.) Profanity in any language is not usually found in books written by earthquake engineering professors, but then again, novels are not usually written by earthquake engineering professors. The vivid and realistic speech is coarse, but coarse phrases in French are also mellifluous, something like bittersweet chocolate. The novel’s earthy sarcasm is not a substitute for solid content about earthquakes, but rather an aid in communicating information about that subject. In its explanation of earthquake engineering facts, usually through the device of the dialogue of a structural engineer conducting earthquake recon-

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.