Rating: 
Summary: Erudite Yet Entertaining
Review: Simon Winchester has turned out many books on many subjects, with their two common qualities being the excellence of his language and the thoroughness of his research, so that the lucky reader is both amused and informed. In Krakatoa Winchester has returned to his roots as a geologist to describe one of the most horrendous volcanic eruptions of all time. In the process of doing so Winchester enlightens us on the theory and history of plate tectonics, the spice trade and its impact on present day Indonesia, the colonial empires of the British and Dutch, Alfred Russell Wallace's research and its parallels with that of Charles Darwin, and the growth of fundamentalist Islam as well as tracing the history of the 1883 explosion and its immediate consequences. He manages all of this in a little less than 400 pages with prose which is witty and crisp. Read Krakatoa even if you think you have absolutely no interest in volcanoes. You will become an instant Simon Winchester fan.
Rating: 
Summary: Manage your expectations.
Review: This book seems to divide readers based on what they expected from it. Those who are interested in Krakatoa (perhaps, like me, because they love "The Twenty-One Balloons" and want the scientific version) will be sorely disappointed, as this book sometimes seems to be about everything *but* the explosion of Krakatoa.Those readers who are interested in Winchester and his fusty-professor style ramblings will be well-satisfied.
Rating: 
Summary: Misleading Title, Tedious Book
Review: Those looking for a good historical narrative of a famous disaster be forewarned: Simon Winchester's "Krakatoa" devotes only about 40 of its over 400 pages to the disaster itself. Instead of a concise account of the volcanic eruption that killed over 36,000 people, Winchester's book covers the entire political history of Indonesia, from colonial times forward. He also heaps on an overly generous amount of science, from what causes volcanic eruptions to descriptions of the botanical landscapes of Southeast Asia. All of this leaves precious little room for the actual eruption, which Winchester doesn't get to until more that 200 pages into the book. He also makes an error by not highlighting any of the many personalities who were either killed by or survived the disaster. The most any individual person gets is a few paragrahs, so there isn't anyone for the reader to develop empathy for. Whole villages are destroyed by tsunamis, but merit only a sentence or two. Instead, the mundane facts and figures keep piling on like the debris from the volcano until the reader is numb. All of which makes me wonder if what Winchester really wanted to do was write a history of Indonesia and merely seized upon the Krakatoa event as a highlight to cash in on the recent historical disaster publishing craze. The subtitle of the book calls it "The Day the World Exploded," which couldn't be a less accurate description of its contents. Winchester compounds the problem by repeating himself a lot, suggesting that the book was not well edited either. Overall, this is confused and meandering book that will likely disappoint many readers.
Rating:
Summary: Dense, wordy, jargon filled...Not for everyone
Review: If you are interested in learning about the catastrophic eruption in 1888 and you either know a lot about or want to know a lot about geology, plate tectonics, etc., then this book is an excellent choice. However, if you merely would like to know a little more about this monumental event without simultaneously taking a course in geology, then this is not the book for you. I fell into the latter category. As a result, this book, at many times, was an effort to read. In my estimation, about half of this book could have been left out and you would not have lost anything. If you want to put this book in a positive light, then you would say it is crammed full of information. If you tend to a more negative depiction of this book, you might say it is clogged full of information, bogged down in seemingly unimportant details. One last piece of advice. With regard to the copious footnotes in the book, if you read them, then you had better be prepared for reading a book in and of itself. The footnotes must be either read in full or completely ignored. There is no middle road on this issue. The bottom line: be careful, this book is not for the casual reader.
Rating: 
Summary: tedious
Review: Way too many digressions with large amounts of unnecessary minutia. If the book was half the size I would have enjoyed it a lot more. His Professor and the Madman was also too stretched out.
Rating:
Summary: Wow.
Review: 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 unwove a great yarn. If you take this book as a story (true, of course) 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 older titles: Tell me another story, Simon!
Rating:
Summary: My review of Krakatoa
Review: This is a well written well researched book that I enjoyed very much. I loved reading about the geography, geology, history, and legacy of the world's most destructive volcano. The creation of the news agency Reuters and the telegraph machine with the advent of Morse Code helped the spread the news of this disaster to the world within moments of the eruption in 1883. I also learned that the Dutch enslaved the people of Java for over two centuries. The rebellion by the Indonesians against the Dutch was ignited by the eruption of Krakatoa and is detailed well in this book. Indonesia now has the largest population of people of Islamic faith in the world because of Dutch rule. Winchester does an excellent job of describing the devastation Krakatoa caused as more than 35,000 people died mostly as the result of the 60 mile a hour tidal waves the eruption caused. The cause of the eruption of Krakatoa in the book is very complex. It is a process called subduction in which a heavier and colder tectonic plate collides with a lighter warmer one. There are many helpful drawings and captions to describe the technical geological concepts. Winchester even rates volcanos with an explosivity index which is based on the amount of material ejected in an eruption and the height the material reaches in the air. I found these concepts about volcanos to be very interesting.
There is a lot of information in this book, and it should be read slowly to understand and appreciate it. If you like to read books about history and earth science, or geography you will enjoy this book.
Rating:
Summary: Not quite what I'd expected
Review: To some extent the title of Simon Winchester's Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded is a little misleading. I had expected an exposition on the event with a little more detail than I had heretofore come across during my other reading on tectonic events. While I was not entirely disappointed, the book is a much more complex narrative than I had expected. Winchester includes a healthy dose of beginning plate tectonics, including its history and brief biographies of some the major contributors to its development, from Alfred Wegener to Elias Hesse among others. While this did not necessarily do more for me than review what I already knew, it would definitely be informative to someone interested in volcanoes but not necessarily grounded in the theories of modern geology. Understanding these theories would definitely help the reader to understand how an event like Krakatoa happened as it did, also perhaps when it did, and where it did. A discussion of evolution was also included, since one of its first proponents, Alfred Russell Wallace (with whom Darwin shared a small piece of the limelight for the discovery) did much of his research in the area. Some of the information on Wallace was very interesting, and the author certainly makes a case for placing Wallace ahead of Darwin with respect to credit for the discovery. However, the book is not about evolution, Darwin, or Alfred Russell Wallace.
The author also includes a political and social history of the East Indies from the first contact with outsiders--the Portugese, the Dutch, the Chinese, the Arab world--and shows how the explosion of Krakatoa might well have brought about a change in the political as well as the geological landscape of the area. While it is certainly very thorough, and in a way interesting, I'm not sure that this is what I wanted from the book. In all, I wondered if these digressions weren't the author's attempt to give breadth to a book for the general reading public on a topic that was slender on data but without expanding too much into the highly technical geological information on the subject. An adequate book, but not quite what I'd expected.
Rating:
Summary: Splendid mix of history, biology and geology about Krakatoa
Review: Without question, Simon Winchester's latest book on the infamous Krakatoa eruption is undoubtedly his best. It is a splendid mix of history, evolutionary biology ahd geology, covering all aspects of the Krakatoa tale. Winchester's descriptions of the development of the theory of plate tectonics - providing the underlying geological mechanisms accounting for the 1883 eruption - are among the best I've read in a work aimed for a popular audience. These are succinct, elegant accounts of the history of geology in the 20th Century, from Alfred Wegener's concept of continental drift through Harry Hess's discovery of seafloor spreading and J. Tuzo Wilson's brilliant conception of internal convention currents as the mechnanism behind plate tectonics. So too is Winchester's overview of biogeography and evolutionary biology, recounting Alfred Russel Wallace's independent discovery of evolution via natural selection that was virtually simultaneous with Charles Darwin's own research. Students of history will be intrigued with the history of Dutch colonization of the East Indies and, especially, the rise of Islamic militancy in the immediate aftermath of the Krakatoa eruption; one which continues to the present. Although Winchester's latest book is surely not the last word on the Krakatoa eruption, it is certainly the most comprehensive popular account to date.
Rating:
Summary: Well-rounded review of the Krakatoa story.
Review: Can you give half stars? 3 ½ stars sounds about right. Very interesting read that covers everything from geology to biology and even the political and sociological impact of the Krakatoa Volcano's massive 1883 explosion. I learned a lot and enjoyed much of the book, especially the discovery of Alfred Russel Wallace and the Wallace line. This amazing story and discovery is worth the price of the book. I did find the book rather uneven with a really poorly written first chapter, ".a Pointed Mountain", but give it time and you will find much to reward in later chapters. If the topic interests you, I'm sure you will enjoy this well-rounded review of the Krakatoa story.
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