Like others of Winchester's work, I picked this up only to abandon the attempt after a few dozen pages. Only after a complete reading can I explain why. He dithers. "Why use ten words when a hundred will do" seems to be his motto. Those extra hundred words to not always impart new information. At times the story flies off the page, at others it plods. A flawed masterpiece. ( )

Winchester does it again. This book tells of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. But it isn't just about the science. It's about the discoveries that Krakatoa led to (plate tectonics, airstreams, metereological advances), the historical circumstances (the beginning of the end of Dutch colonialism, Victorian fascination with the exotic, oceanic telegraph cables), and the historical consequences (climate change, civil unrest).

The work certainly shows Winchester's background in geology more than other works, but it also shows his wit, insight, and research skills ( )

This is a great book for getting a grounding in the history of Krakatoa, both in terms of its infamous eruption as well as the societies that surrounded it at the time. It is more of a narrative than a scientific piece, although it touches on various elements on its way.

The book delivers an engaging tale of the social setup of the Dutch colonies providing a detailed backdrop to the drama of the eruption, with background on the Victorian characters who make the time period interesting.

Not only this, but it also hints at the beginnings of globalisation, and documents the spread of news around the world, with tidbits of information on the worldwide sensation the eruption caused.

The eruption itself is told both through the geological forces, and the after effects - those parts that could be (and were often) documented by intrepid Men of Science, bureaucrats, and various observers.

All in all, a great read and given it's length, one that I didn't tire with. ( )

I'm jealous of Simon Winchester, which always leaves me in pouting mood when I read his books: He writes about the subjects I would write about, too, if I had my proverbial act together, with a multi-disciplinary elan reminiscent of wood-paneled studies, lairs of 19th century British men of leisure.

I picture Winchester's desk, as he writes, piled high with the skeletons of small (exotic) mammals and absolutely adorable, anachronistic scientific devices made all of glass and brass. I want this man's life, and also the impossible, romanticized Victorian era his craft hearkens to: every man can be an expert, a trailblazer of natural science, but, as I am not a man, none of this would have ever been open to me, so I am nostalgic over something nonexistent.

My geographic ignorance of the Indonesian island arc is profound. Was profound. Reading Winchester's work on the enormous exploding of a volcano here in 1883 helped, on a layman's level, to patch up this problem for me. Wichester covers the subject holistically, with snatches of biography, biology, political science, geology and geography. This is very much how I roll, and this book--coupled with an atlas and occasional scampers off to Wikipedia to elucidate (or provide bogus information about) a point mentioned in passing--was key in filling in one of the last areas of the earth that I wouldn't be able to fill in on a map.

Now I can point at Sumatra, Malacca (AND the Moluccas), Bali and other sundry constituents of Micronesia and Polynesia with gusto.

That is, Winchester's books, like the books of anyone worth his salt in this genre, gives a reader that sense of learning across the sciences, that generalist thrill and the actual sensation of new wrinkles forming in one's brain. He doesn't assume any prior specialized knowledge--though this is quite unfortunate when it comes to the long chapter on the nuts and bolts and history of plate tectonics; anyone with even a passing understanding of the mechanics here will probably glaze over. I did. Not to mention I'd already basically read that chapter in one of his other books on the San Francisco 1906 earthquake.

Winchester spends about two thirds of the book foreshadowing the earth-shattering kaboom that is about to occur (well, in August of 1883). So much so that he has run out of bombastic overstatements by the time he gets there. His writing, if not exactly purple, sometimes bangs out and feels over-endowed; the man has a love of meaningless words like 'unfathomable', 'unutterably', 'unimaginably.' Is it not his job to fathom, utter and imagine for us?

Because of this, the giant rafts of pumice floating around the Indian ocean with thousands of DEAD PEOPLE on them feels somewhat glossed over. His treatment of the eruption's concomitant tsunami(s) is not dismissive or careless, but suffers from lack of scale and what sounds like a likely irreconcilable lack of sources. It's simply hard, perhaps impossible, to talk about the sweeping death of tens of thousands rationally, to make it sound like a part of the same story as the anecdotes about British spider experts and headstrong explorers.

What I could not abide, however, were a couple of the book's technical drawings. One in particular, a sketch of the island group's metamorphosis (Krakatoa, or, more accurately, Krakatau, was actually a small group of islands, not just one, in the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java), portrayed cardinal north pointing off to the bottom left of the drawing. Giving as this serves as the main reference map to the descriptions of all subsequent tales, this is inexcusable. I spent the entire book being confused about which way was up (north), compounded by the fact that the islands' shapes and existence were constantly changing and that none of the other supplied drawings or maps or charts seemed to agree with each other. Unacceptable! You have just confused your audience!

Winchester also makes a few claims that felt dubious. One that I knew was not true: as part of his consistent condescension to the Mt. St. Helens eruption, he claims that the sounds of the explosion were not heard outside of the mountain range it was in. My stepmother heard it loud and clear in Boise, Idaho, several hundred miles east of the source. Another phenomenon that he mentions is that residents of Batavia (basically Jakarta), to the east of the event, did not really hear anything, but just felt air pressure shock waves. This is the same thing that happened in Portland, Ore. (my hometown) during the St. Helens eruption. The current going theory is that it has something to do with the way that sound waves go up from the volcano and then eventually bounce off the atmosphere and come down. In the area underneath that arc--the areas closest to the volcano--there is silence. Outside it, booming sounds. No one in Portland heard the Mt. St. Helens eruption. It was silent here. In Eugene, Ore., 100 miles south, and thus further from the source, it was quite loud.

This is the strongest of the Winchester books I have read to date. It's a pleasure to read for those intrigued by geographic and geologic histories of earth. Winchester does a lovely job crafting a narrative, and makes me jealous of him once again. ( )

Just finished this one. It seems to be very typical of Simon Winchester's books, the good and the bad. Certainly no one could complain that he did not set the scene - he took a very long time to do so. In fact, it was well over 100 pages in before the eruption was really discussed at length. But most of the information was really interesting - the history of Dutch colonialism, the theory of plate tectonics. However, when we got to the actual eruption, I felt that more could have been included. Worth reading, but not always a page turner. ( )