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Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded Hardcover – April 1, 2003

4.1 out of 5 stars 419 customer reviews

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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 432 pages
  • Publisher: HarperCollins; 1st edition (April 1, 2003)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0066212855
  • ISBN-13: 978-0066212852
  • Product Dimensions: 6 x 1 x 9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (419 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #65,548 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Format: Hardcover
By late summer of this year, 120 years will have passed since the greatest natural disaster to occur on this planet since mankind began recording history some 30,000 years ago.
It was exactly 10:02 a.m. on Monday, August 27, 1883 when the small volcanic island of Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra blew itself out of existence with an explosion that was heard thousands of miles away and that resulted in the deaths of over 36,000 people. That eruption is believed to be the loudest sound ever heard by human ears.
As Simon Winchester points out in this latest of his detailed historical-scientific investigative books, the vast majority of those 36,417 victims were killed not by the explosion itself, but by the enormous tsunami it created. This moving mountain of seawater wiped out whole towns; devastated the social and economic life of a region measured in thousands of miles; and was recorded on tide gauges as far away as France.
Winchester specializes in detailed accounts that shine light into odd or forgotten corners of history. His two most recent successful efforts in that genre were THE MAP THAT CHANGED THE WORLD and THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN. Now he has crafted a vividly written book of 400-plus pages about an event that was over in a matter of hours. KRAKATOA is certainly full of digressions that have only tangential relevance to its main subject --- but those digressions are so well researched, beautifully written and just plain interesting that they become assets rather than liabilities. The reader does not really object to the fact that the eruption doesn't begin until past the halfway point in Winchester's text.
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Format: Hardcover
If ever a book cried out for the services of a good editor, Simon Winchester's Krakatoa is that book. After writing his fascinating The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary it was hugely disappointing to plod through and then eventually abandon in frustration this bloated odyssey into minutiae and self-absorption. And like a bad B-movie, the monster, the volcano Krakatoa itself hardly puts in an appearance until page 150 only to have its dramatic tension decimated by a digressive chapter about the development of underwater communications cables.
The book suffers from at least three major flaws that render it so disappointing. The first is that Winchester simply cannot resist pouring everything including the kitchen sink into his book. The second is that the author seems to believe that the longer a sentence is, the better. And finally Winchester cannot resist injecting himself repeatedly into the book. This reader suspects that Winchester's publisher was in on the fraud knowing that there was a problem and chose to hide it from perspective buyers rather than demand a rewrite. Read the cover sleeves and one is lead to believe that the book is all about Krakatoa. There is not a word about the fact that 90% of the book is about such varied topics as Dutch colonialism, plate tectonics, the early history of undersea cables, and even personal events from the life of the author. Call me stupid, but I expected to read a book about Krakatoa, not about the personal life of Simon Winchester and every non-volcanic tangent that the author found personally interesting. Had the sleeve synopsis borne any resemblance to the book, I would certainly not have started reading it.
There were some good parts, but they were few and frustratingly far between!
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Format: Hardcover
A few volcanoes have had larger eruptions. One volcano -- also located in what is present-day Indonesia -- killed more people. But no volcano has gripped the public's imagination all over the world like Krakatoa.
Simon Winchester explains that this was as much a matter of timing as it had to do with the deadly power of Krakatoa's eruption. When it exploded in 1883, the world had just been linked together by underwater cables over the previous two decades. News readers in the West were thus linked to events in the East with an immediacy they never had before.
All around the world, scientists of the time were able to use this information when measuring and observing certain phenomenon in their own localities. As Winchester points out, this was significant, marking the first time that scientists had proof of the interconnectedness of the world, that the globe was not just a hodgepodge of separate regions.
As some reviewers have already mentioned, perhaps the most remarkable part of the book is the chapter called "Close Encounters on the Wallace Line". Here Winchester shows how Alfred Russel Wallace's observation of distinct fauna on the Indonesian Archipelago, narrowly separated by the eponymous line that splits through the middle of the group of islands, in a way foretold the twentieth century discovery of continental plates and subduction -- the processes responsible for the volcano's terrible eruption. (Wallace himself seems to have had an intuition that geological processes were responsible for two such different groups of animals being clustered together.)
After Winchester gives this context, he then moves on to the actual eruption of Krakatoa.
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