Surprise Me

Начало книги

On January 17, 1994, at 4:30:55 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, a 6.7-magnitude earthquake jolted most of Southern California awake. It lasted twenty seconds but felt interminable, a blind thrust quake producing the highest general ground acceleration ever instrumentally recorded in an urban area in North America.

Although the epicenter was in the San Fernando Valley, about twenty miles northwest of the center of Los Angeles, damage occurred up to eighty-five miles away.

Isabelle Rothman, a senior at Chandler College, located several miles east of downtown, and at least thirty miles away from the quake site, was tossed out of bed, onto the floor of her bedroom, books and a dresser tumbling around her. Immediately she saw it as the wakeup call she needed: Life is unpredictable, have some courage.

A few blocks away, Daniel Jablonski, starting his fourth year as some sort of ill-defined visiting professor at the same college, woke to the sound of a freight train rushing through his rented campus house. It took him all of the twenty seconds of shaking and rocking to realize he was in the midst of one of California’s legendary earthquakes. And not much more time than that to understand that here was the consummate confirmation of what he had come to believe in his life: that all is unstable and there is no safety.

Читать дальше →