Earthquake time bombs

"Yeats sheds new light on other earthquake hot-spots around the world and the communities at risk, including Caracas, Kabul, Tehran, and Jerusalem. He examines these seismic threats in the context of recent cultural history, including economic development, national politics, and international conflicts, and draws comparisons between the capacity of first-world and developing-world coutnries to prepare for the inevitable"--Dust jacket

I. Earthquakes, deep time, and the population explosion. 1. Plate tectonics and why we have earthquakes -- 2. An earthquake primer -- 3. Deep time -- 4. When's the next Big One? -- 5. Population explosion and increased risk to megacities --II. Earthquake time bombs. 6. San Francisco Bay Area -- 7. Los Angeles -- 8. Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver : Cascadia subduction zone -- 9. Japan : Tokyo and the Kansai -- 10. Wellington, New Zealand -- 11. Santiago, Chile -- 12. Prologue in central China -- Other time bombs, including cities that are not well prepared. 13. Age of Enlightenment and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake -- 14. Jerusalem : earthquakes in the Holy Land -- 15. Istanbul : responding to an official earthquake warning -- 16. Tehran : the next earthquake in the Islamic Republic of Iran? -- 17. Kabul : decades of war and Babur's warning -- 19. Myanmar and the Sagaing fault -- 20. Metro Manila, the Philippines -- 21. Lima, Peru : Inca earthquake-resistant construction and a bogus American earthquake prediction -- 22. Andean earthquakes in Quito and Guayaquil, Ecuador -- 23. Caracas : lots of oil, but little interest in earthquakes -- 24. Haiti, which lost its gamble, and Jamaica …