Krakatoa The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883

Simon Winchester — 2005

Simon Winchester, New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman, examines the legendary annihilation in 1883 of the volcano-island of Krakatoa, which was followed by an immense tsunami that killed nearly forty thousand people. The effects of the immense waves were felt as far away as France. Barometers in Bogotá and Washington, D.C., went haywire. Bodies were washed up in Zanzibar. The sound of the island's destruction was heard in Australia and India and on islands thousands of miles away. Most significant of all -- in view of today's new political climate -- the eruption helped to trigger in Java a wave of murderous anti-Western militancy among fundamentalist Muslims, one of the first outbreaks of Islamic-inspired killings anywhere. Krakatoa gives us an entirely new perspective on this fascinating and iconic event. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Reviews

Wynter@wynter

May 4, 2023

Informative book on an interesting subject, but way too padded with tangential subjects, like spice trade, Dutch colonialism, tectonic plate science history, Islamic revolution in Indonesia, etc. Understandably, all of these are important to see the big picture of Krakatoa's role in political, cultural, and economic histories of the geographical area, but these digressions are often distracting. The actual meat of the book is lean and spread out thin, which makes it quite easy to put the book aside and forget it for a few days. I couldn't concentrate on the writing for longer periods of time at once. Seriously, it took me too long to read this.