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Title: The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755
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Manufacturer: Viking Adult
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| The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 by Viking Adult A Disaster Like No Other | The earthquake that hit Lisbon on 1 November 1755 shook up a lot more than its buildings and citizens. There were repercussions for science, religion, philosophy, politics, and literature. In _The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755_ (Viking) Nicholas Shrady gives a compelling short account of the disaster itself, and the history of the events leading up to it, but spends far more of the pages in a fascinating description of the effects of the quake in local and global history. There have been bigger disasters, even in our own times, but this one was not only big, but it made gigantic differences even in the way humans looked at their place in the world. Shrady says that because of this particular disaster in a particular place, all people all over the world "from staunch clerics to enlightened philosophers were compelled to re-examine their most cherished dogmas." We are still living with some of the changes the earthquake wrought.
José I may have been king, but Portugal was largely ruled by the church which was the largest landowner and which supported the justly-feared Holy Office of the Inquisition. Every traveler noted how pious the inhabitants were, but many of them were in church when the disaster began, first with tremors, then violent waves from the sea, then from fire from all the household fireplaces that were beneath the collapsed buildings. Ten percent of the populace was wiped out. As in all disasters or diseases, there were those who knew that God was sending a message to those afflicted. The message, however, did not make sense. Lisbon was no worse than any large city, and demonstrably more pious than the others. The flawed hero of this book, the Portuguese Secretary of State, Sebastião Carvalho, realized that blaming people's sinfulness for the disaster would only undercut his efforts to bring them together to surmount it. The changes in thinking were not just religious, but more broadly philosophical. The most famous changes came in Voltaire's reaction to the ideas of Leibnitz, who reasoned that if the world was the product of a benevolent and all-powerful God, then it must be the best of all possible worlds, no matter how hard it is for us to see the goodness. In 1759, Voltaire published _Candide_, a rollicking, bawdy, fast-moving tale of inexplicable ups-and-downs, including the main characters' presence in the Lisbon earthquake. The book made fun not only of Leibnitz's philosophy, but of the Church, the Inquisition, the nobility, the military, and more. It isn't surprising that governments tried to suppress it, and also not surprising that it became a bestseller. There was no sense in trying to figure out how the world is the best possible one, the book shows; we must simply get on with the duties of our lives. It was a stylistic death-blow to deistic optimism.
It also was part of a new mood of skepticism that encouraged scientific explanations of catastrophes rather than religious explanations. Carvalho arranged for a survey to be widely distributed, to document how people perceived the earthquake and its effects, answering questions like "Did you perceive the shock to be greater from one direction than another?" or "Did the sea rise or fall first?" The undulating waves of the ground reported by many who survived may have triggered the first ideas that earthquakes spread as waves; the first theories of wave motion within the Earth were put forward by English physicist John Mitchell in 1760. The Lisbon earthquake, then, was the beginning of seismology. A new city was designed from scratch, on an enlightened rational grid that became a model for the future rebuilding of Paris. Military engineers constructed the first buildings in Europe designed to withstand earthquakes. Shrady writes that the "disaster would also usher in a new era, one in which a wholesome sense of doubt and the powers of reason would replace the certainties of religious dogma, and the numbing resignation that providence instilled would give way to the liberation of human promise." But he also reminds us that the new era is not completely arrived, for there will always be those that take sanctimonious satisfaction in the punishment God deals out to others. The retired archbishop of New Orleans, for instance, insisted that hurricane Katrina was deserved chastisement for sexual attitudes, abortions, and drug addiction. Lisbon's lessons are not yet universal.
| | The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 by Viking Adult Product Description | 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. |
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