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Presents a comprehensive account of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the fires that burned for three days afterward killing over three thousand people and destroying twenty-eight thousand buildings, and traces the experiences of those who lived through it.

First biography of the little-known real-life Tom Sawyer (a friend of Mark Twain during his brief tenure as a California newspaper reporter), told through a harrowing account of Sawyer's involvement in the hunt for a serial arsonist who terrorized mid-nineteenth century San Francisco.