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Publisher's Summary

A riveting history of how the cataclysmic Lisbon earthquake shook the religious and intellectual foundations of Enlightenment Europe. Along with the volcanic destruction of Pompeii and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Lisbon quake of 1755 is one of the most destructive natural disasters ever recorded. After being jolted by a massive quake, Lisbon was then pounded by a succession of tidal waves and finally reduced to ash by a fire that raged for five straight days.
In The Last Day, Nicholas Shrady provides not only a vivid account of this horrific disaster but also a stimulating survey of the many shock waves it sent throughout Western civilization. When news of the quake spread, it inspired both a lurid fascination in the popular imagination of Europe and an intellectual debate about the natural world and God's place in human affairs. Voltaire, Alexander Pope, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among other eminent figures, took up the disaster as a sort of cause célèbre and a vehicle to express Enlightenment ideas. More practically, the Lisbon quake led to the first concerted effort at disaster control, modern urban planning, and the birth of seismology. The Last Day is popular history writing at its best and will appeal to readers of Simon Winchester's Krakatoa and A Crack in the Edge of the World.
©2008 Nicholas Shrady (P)2008 Tantor
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Critic Reviews

"An elegant, pertinent study." ( Kirkus Reviews)
"Smart, stylishly written history." ( Publishers Weekly)
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Most Helpful
3 out of 5 stars
By WERNER on 05-08-17

could be better

Is there anything you would change about this book?

The narrator.

Would you be willing to try another book from Nicholas Shrady? Why or why not?

Possibly.

How could the performance have been better?

The narrator, and this goes for all narrators, should learn how to pronounce names.

Did The Last Day inspire you to do anything?

As always with history and historic fiction, it inspired me to search the net and find the places and people mentioned. It HELPS if the narrator gets close enough to correct pronunciation to aid in finding the references.

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