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

by Simon Winchester

Book Overview

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 Bogota and Washington, D.C., went haywire. Bodies were washed up in Zanzibar. The sound of the island's destruction was heard...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006093736X
• ISBN13: 9780060937362
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 0.91 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Excellent, detailed history of massive volcanic eruption

Detailed history of the major volcanic eruption of Krakatoa. I learned so much! This is a true, documented historical look at one of the biggest eruptions in our history. I really had a hard time putting it down to do anything else.

A very interesting book about the first disaster in modern time observed around the world

A detailed looking the 1883 eruption. Easy to read hard to put down

An Entire Education

A huge chunk of my education came at a cost of $14.95 plus shipping in the form of this set of CDs smoothly, and knowingly read by the author in his charming English accent and covering the science, art, politics, history, government, sociology, geography, geology and more of the late 1800's but written as a suspenseful mystery/ adventure tale might be with chilling, thrilling vistas of devastation and edge-of-your-seat moments and surprises. Could be the basis for a year of study in college or, as in my case, the late-in-life rounding out of a perpetual amateur student.

A Funky, Fascinating Tale Of The World's Loudest Explosion

On August 27, 1883 James Wallis, the British chief of police on the island of Rodriguez in the Indian Ocean, made a curious entry in his official log. He noted the roar of heavy guns coming from his east, over a nearly four hour time frame. He could see no ships, no smoke, and no indications of hostile military action. One can only imagine his later shock at discovering the source of these mysterious sounds: the volcanic destruction of the Island of Krakatoa, fully 2968 miles to the east, roughly the same distance between Philadelphia and San Francisco. [p. 260] By author Simon Winchester's reckoning, there have been only five geologic explosions of the magnitude of Krakatoa in the history of the planet, and he can barely contain his pleasure that one [thankfully, only one] of these events took place in our lifetime, relatively speaking. For indeed this is one of the compelling facets of the work, the availability of modern communications and scientific instrumentation and their role in both reporting and deciphering the event. Transoceanic telegraph lines, seismographs, motorized shipping, and barometers all play invaluable roles in this work. Before rushing into superlatives about the magnitude and destructiveness of the explosion, a word about this literary genre. "Disaster stories" present the historian with particular problems. Cataclysms occur in a context. An author must strike a balance between an inadequate set-up and a distracting one. In his splendid history of the Johnstown Flood, David McCullough devotes about 40% of his text to the build-up of the actual catastrophe, which gives the reader the added opportunity of making informed "before and after" assessments. Winchester places the final paroxysm of Krakotoa over 50% of the way into his work. Admittedly, this is a substantial "set-up" but for this circumstance a justifiable one. Before the molten Armageddon the author takes us on a detailed, insightful, humorous and colorful journey through several centuries of Dutch colonization of Indonesia, the biological curiosities of the region, and of course the underground politics of the earth's crust. The author's explanation of plate tectonics-the movements of continental pieces that ultimately cause the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions at the earth's surface-is worthy of special note. It is surprising to learn that the major forces of the earth's crust are down, and not up, and that certain regions of the oceans' shorelines are particularly vulnerable to tectonic instability. For the 35,000 or more residents of Java and elsewhere who lost their lives to the explosion, this is a regrettable geographic reality. Krakatoa itself suffered a bad reputation long before the 1883 denouement. One of a string of islands that borders the Sudra Strait in the Dutch East Indies, its volcanic unpredictability was well known-and at times quite visible-to the more populous trade centers of Java and Sumatra. Winchester observed that the island w

Wow.

I really enjoyed this book. It was history written very much the way I like to read it. Obviously, that's a statement that has a lot to do with personal taste, and I can certainly understand why some reviewers here didn't react to this title in at all the same way. Simon Winchester has not given us a straightforward, journalistic, dispassionate, just-the-facts narrative of a discreet event, in which the mountain explodes on page one and the text ends when the ash stops falling, with an epilogue meditating on the event from the perspective of 120 years later. If that's what you're expecting, or the way your preferences run, you're going to be truly disappointed. No, what Winchester has given us is much more of a narrative in the true sense of "story," full of explanation, characterization, interesting asides -- I literally pictured myself sitting by a campfire as Simon the Storyteller wove a great yarn. If you take this book as a story and settle in for it, instead of tapping your feet impatiently and checking your wristwatch, I think you'll get a lot more out of it. In fact, this book reminded me a lot of the books written and TV shows hosted by James Burke (one of which -- coincidentally? -- was titled The Day The Universe Changed). Winchester weaves together history, sociology, geology, physics, biology, and much more. The reader is taken through Dutch colonial administration, the state of nineteenth-century volcanology, the validity of "ethogeological prediction," and quite a few other things before the mountain finally gets around to detonating somewhere about page 207. That part of the story, the actual day the world exploded, is told in an excellent chapter titled "The Paroxysm, the Flood, and the Crack of Doom." After that, effects are tabulated, lessons are learned, and -- after a quick narrative of the author's own visit to Anak Krakatoa, the "son" of the original volcano, the book ends. Winchester's style shouldn't distract the reader from the quality of the work he's done. The breadth of the story reveals the breadth of his research. The one area where I thought the research, or at least the presentation of evidence was a little on the thin side, was in the argument that seems to be capturing the most attention from reviewers, namely that the Krakatoa eruption precipitated a growth in Islamic fundamentalism in Indonesia that is still affecting us today. My fear was that this would turn out to be largely a case of the *post hoc* fallacy. Now I'm willing to accept there may be a causal relationship. But I still wish Winchester had buttressed this point more fully. On the other hand, that didn't seem to have as much weight in the book as it's being given in reviews. And on the whole, this is a very good work of both history and storytelling. I thought it was much better *writing* than I've found in the massive tomes of various bestselling "popular" historians, and much better *history* too. Now I need to track down some of his olde

FASCINATING PAGE TURNER...HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

At first glance Simon Winchester's true account of this absolutely catastrophic (surely an understatement) volcanic event of the late 1800s appears to be structured a bit like a text book with carefully chosen and interesting illustrations and maps...but after you are a few chapters into the book his rich narrative begins to grab you and won't let go! The compelling details of this infamous chapter in history (which claimed 40,000 lives mostly from tsunamis following the eruption) is fascinating enough. Even more interesting though are the correlations which Winchester examines between these events and the Dutch abandonment of the region resulting in the civil and religious unrest still existing today.A surprisingly good read, carefully researched and full of rich historical details and illustrations. You'll want to spend at least a few evenings travelling to the South Seas for a real adventure in historical Krakatoa.