Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883, Simon Winchester

This book would be better titled "Plate Tectonics." Simon Winchester leaves no stone unturned in his valiant effort to ensure that we understand everything (and I do mean everything) about the massive eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. Massive it was, wiping out entire towns and an estimated 30,000 people, cooling the earth's atmostphere and destroying completely the island Krakatoa. Sounds interesting, no? Too bad the book isn't. Winchester took a highly analytical, researched approach to the subject, which stook him well in chapters about how volcanos come to erupt, and very light on detail in the chapters devoted to describing the devastation caused by Krakatoa. The book cover's lurid promise is no means fulfilled. Winchester's painstaking research is obvious, and the book is peppered with footnotes adding facts that even he recognized were off-topic and esoteric. Here's my favorite:

A pair of fast ships set out from Macassar, *...

* From whence came the eponymous sweet-smelling hair oil, the bane of countless English chairbacks and the cause of the creation of the protective lace furniture shroud called, somewhat unoriginally, an antimacassar.

I expected to thoroughly enjoy this book, but was instead bored and frustrated, while still respecting the scholarship that went into producing this dry-as-dust version of one of the most exciting natural catastrophes of modern man.

Posted by supersusie at November 10, 2004 11:09 PM