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Karen Kay Ullom Thank you. The book is more informative than the shows that I have seen on TV. There is a lot that has been explained.
This story is filled with interesting facts and the exact order of what happened and when. If you ever wanted to know the real story if the Greatest Volcanic Eruption in modern times, this is it. Not only the eruption itself but a lot of side stories about what happened to some of the people involved.
Sep.16-2009 This is my seccond book from Simon Winchester ( the other was The map that changed the World).Winchester is a great writer giving you a broad and at the same time concise perspective of the subject he covers.In this case one wonders how can you write a thick book on just the subject of a volcanic explosion (). Well he reffers to thesocial life of Dutch collonies in the East, and so many other facts, from the laying of underwater cables for telegrapgh, to the evolutionof life even after the island of Krakatoa exploded.I highly recomend this book.This review was written from Madrid, Spain.
I expected, perhaps, more detail about the geology of the area, the eruption, the horrendus consequences. But somehow, for me, that did not endear me to the story of Krakatoa.
I.e., a plethora of high quality figures probably would have won me over. In thinking about what to write.because I do not like to be negative about pretty much anything.I thought that the book would have been much improved if it had been presented in the over-sized, illustration-heavy style of Orphan Tsunami (by Brian Atwater).
Well, I wish I had a better review to offer. I am sure that a history buff will enjoy the book immensely as it is full of the history of the Dutch presence, the events of the day.
In conclusion, you might enjoy the book tremendously; personally, I waded through it, more or less waiting patiently to get to the meat of the matter, which is way, way at the end of the book. As a professional geologist, I found the book wanting, but it is hard to articulate why.
What I got was a lot of that but even more--way more--marginalia.
Finally in plate tectonics we had an explanation for so much that was previously unexplained about the earth. When you finish you've certainly seen a lot, been challenged by the pace, possibly even feel a bit queasy with all you've seen and especially with all you've inevitably missed. From zoogeographical distribution of species we move to Winchester's first love, geology: from the Pangaea theory of continental drift first proposed by the German Alfred Wegener, through 20th century studies of gravity and magnetism, to the overarching concept of plate tectonics published in 1969. Winchester describes with enthusiasm the collision of massive plates on the surface of our planet, with the heavier oceanic basalt plates bullying their way under the edges of the lighter continental plates, creating weak spots where energy is released in earthquakes and (for the purposes of this book) volcanoes, with molten material creating island arcs.
Though Winchester was not so succinct, it can be said in summary that the Dutch co-opted the Hindu port city of Jayakarta, a "sultry, fetid estuary," and turned it into a company town they called Batavia. The Sunda Strait was under constant surveillance due to its importance to shipping. The British Royal Society prepared a 500-page report. All grist for Winchester's mill.As a coda to the eruptions, Winchester describes the unrest in the area and the way in which it foreshadowed the end of colonial rule. The area was at the time a cosmopolitan center of the European spice trade.
He mentions the distinctive distribution of animal life along either side of the east-west divide known as the Wallace line, after Alfred Russell Wallace whose work in the region was as groundbreaking as Darwin's in the Galapagos Islands. The noise was heard 3,000 miles away and the pressure waves were recorded on barographs around the world, circling the globe at a perceptible level seven times. The city swelled with Dutch, Indonesians and Chinese. Those who know Simon Winchester's work will know what to expect from him in a book about a volcanic eruption.
Five cubic miles of material was blown into the atmosphere. Ash particles were blown 120,000 miles into the atmosphere and gave the world vivid sunsets and refracted light from the sun and moon. European immigrants wrote letters home. Gas, lava and pumice, and especially tsunamis killed at least 36,000 people. But if you listen to the author's unabridged audio presentations and respond favorably, as I always do, to his enthusiasm for his subject and his dry, wry humor, then don't miss "Krakatoa." It's a rollicking, ambitious, fairly well-integrated book--for me, a five-star book.Linda Bulger, 2009
Not for Winchester is the straight shot to lava and ash; first we must explore the history and geography of the area where this disaster took place.Krakatoa, a cone-topped island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, was the product of much earlier volcanic activity and erupted catastrophically in August 1883. The Portuguese had been trading spices (especially pepper) through Java since the early 16th century. Artists and poets recorded the atmospheric phenomena. Events like this eruption, he tells us, are reminders of the truth of American historian Will Durant's quote: Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.Simon Winchester's work is not for everyone, nor are books like this one, hip-deep in science, history and cataclysm. Winchester had no shortage of material to draw on.
World trade was drastically changed by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869; transoceanic telegraph cables were connecting the world around the same time (thanks, he tells us, to a natural latex sap called gutta-percha), and Batavia was rapidly being improved by the development of the telephone and gas and ice works.More than halfway through Krakatoa CD: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 Winchester gives us the unimaginable violence of the eruption. His books are like one-semester survey courses --"English Poetry from Beowulf to WWII", "World History 101"--or a pub crawl in Boston. The ecosystems of both the remnant island and the new cone have been studied and are described by Winchester, who visited Anak Krakatoa and found it as eerie as he expected. Krakatoa itself is known to have erupted in the past, particularly in 535 AD according to the evidence of ice cores and tree rings; though there is "historical catalepsy," as he puts it, in the written record; and again in 1680.Picking up the thread of the region's inhabitants, the Dutch trade monopoly ended with the 17th century and Batavia was reconfigured as a colonial capital rather than a company town.
Muslim influence began to grow in the 19th century, and the mythic importance of the earth's violence dated back to a time "before science replaced seers." I thought he might go on to the dismantlement of the colonial structures in the 20th century, but he did not.Although two-thirds of the island of Krakatoa was destroyed in 1883--blown into the air or falling into its own caldera--a new volcanic island known as Anak Krakatoa ("Child of Krakatoa") broke the surface in 1930 and continues to grow. A late 16th century Dutch expedition to the area (known as the East Indies) brought back the much-desired pepper for huge profit, and when the Dutch were granted a spice-trading monopoly in the area, the Dutch East India Company was formed to carry on this lucrative venture. Thanks to telegraphy, the news was reported around the world instantly. Eruptions and tremors began in June of 1883, and on August 27 a series of violent explosions destroyed most of the island.
Setting political history aside for the moment, Winchester turns to the science of the area. The area we now know as Indonesia sits on a great subduction zone between the Eurasian and Indo-Australian Plates, and its violent volcanic history is thus explained; Indonesia has more active volcanoes (130) than any other nation on earth.
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