Rating: 
Summary: Explosive Reality!
Review: More than 40 years ago, I was a seventh grade science fan of volcanoes, unimaginitively researching a project on them. I felt a personal connection with Krakatoa when my father told me that his mother had told him about the spectacular sunsets she saw for several years after the volcano's explosion.
Winchester has the knack of a historian/story-teller, and he weaves in an astonishing amount of geology and physics that a non-science person like me is amazed to find both comprehensible and entertaining. The personal stories that Winchester has gathered makes the event quite real, and the occasional photographs, sketches, and diagrams are fascinating. Several of them are extraordinary.
Other reviewers have commented on the author's connection of the current world social and political state to the 1883 explosion. Perhaps this short section is the fault-line under the book's premise. The book holds up even so.
It is readable, mind-boggling at times, a bit sad, and even holds some shocks for the reader--an excellent adventure story and a fine summer beach book.
Rating: 
Summary: Repeatative, Repeatative, Repeatative
Review: I will start by saying that I really liked "The Professor and the Madman", but this was something completely different. it appeared to me that Simon Winchester was commited to the idea or contractually obligated to write this book, but when he got into it he realized that there was not enough material for a full length book. For that reason there was a tremendous amount of repetition of the same ideas and in many instances the same anecdotes are repeated in several chapters. The other problem I had with this book is that it was almost entirely taken from other books. Most of the content was pretty much a cut-and-paste from earlier books and other sources. I would have liked to have seen interviews with living geologists, vulcanologists, and perhaps even more residents of Java and Sumatra that might have had oral family histories to share. In conclusion I think that this could have been a better book if it had been not just copied from older sources with personal quotes inserted in between.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but not riveting
Review: A decent tale that contains many of Winchester's trademark tangents and sidelines. It seems that Krakatoa was perhaps not big enough to adequately use all of Winchester's prodigious writing talents. For my tastes, Winchester does better as a world traveler and writer than as a geologist. I have read many of Winchester's books and, if you liked The Map that Changed the World, you will like the geology and geography of Krakatoa. If, however, you are not particularly interested in these subjects, I would advise Winchester's Pacific Rising or The Sun Never Sets, both of which I enjoyed a fair amount more.
Rating:
Summary: A Very Informative and Entertaining Story
Review: Even though I lived for 5 years in the shadow of this volcano while working for Krakatau Steel, and spent a lot of time exploring this region, including 2 trips to the volcano itself, I nevertheless learned so much more by reading this book. Could an editor tidy up this book quite a bit? I suppose, but I'm glad I read it as is with its unpretentious tone while covering leagues of scientific and historical territory. Was the link between the eruption and Muslim unrest stretched a little thin? I suppose, but I lived in Cilegon for years without ever hearing of the massacre that occurred there, so I'm grateful he mentioned it. I think many of us who have roamed to remote regions like this are left striving to comprehend how one small planet can contain so much variety in nature and man. Finding the themes and threads that bind things together becomes a craving that this book has done much to satisfy. Terima kasih banyak, Pak Simon!
Rating: 
Summary: An engaging book that weaves history and geology together
Review: Krakatoa blew itself off the face of the earth in 1883 and wreaked havoc in the process. Simon Winchester does a good job of weaving together a large dose of history, a moderate dose of plate tectonics and small bits of other disciplines to tell the story. The geology lessons provide a useful and not overly technical setting and the history seems to have been researched well. He does a particularly good job of giving us a feeling for the era and for the colonial society of the Dutch East Indies. But the author has an unfortunate tendency to overdramatize, and with such a dramatic story he need not have bothered. And he steps into silliness when he stretches a minor incident of rebellion against the Dutch shortly after the eruption into a foreshadowing of today's tensions between the Isalmic world and the West. Mr. Winchester could have written a shorter, punchier text if he'd left out the repetious and eventually irritating dramatic foreshadowing, but the story he tells is so intriguing that it overcomes the book's shortcomings.
Rating:
Summary: A PBS documentary, but on paper
Review: Having read Winchester's "The Professor and the Madman", and after hearing about the book on the radio, I decided that I couldn't help but read this book. Though Winchester refers to Krakatoa as a widely-known event, I can confess to having only a slight recognition of the name prior to this book. I won't forget now. Winchester covers enormous ground in this book, writing about evolution, plate tectonics, Islam, the telegraph, imperialism, the Line of Demarcation, the flora of the East Indies, and more. Do not be fooled, you will leave this book with a greater understanding of much of the origin of the modern world. One delicious tidbit: Winchester argues that the relative cultural size of the world shrank much more at the eruption of Krakatoa than at the dawn of the Internet. On the other hand, Winchester seems to be constantly implying apology for the last 800 years of Western European history. He has a few particular zingers for the nosy British. Overall, this book is lot of little bits. And, oh yeah, the central part of the book -- Krakatoa's explosion -- was absolutely riveting. My vision of hell now involves something of Dante and something of Krakatoa. I recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Too verbose; his editor must have been on vacation
Review: Never use one word when ten will do. Very pedagogical. A truly fascinating topic that could have been much better addressed with a tightly edited work. The New Yorker style insights into the telegraph, Dutch colonialization, etc. are interesting, but too verbose.
Rating:
Summary: Krakatoa, from discovery to rebirth
Review: This remarkable treasure chest of historical trivia is laid out as a history of the Dutch East Indies, with center place being given to the island of Krakatoa. Anyone uninterested in the social, political, historical, and geological background to the famous eruption can just skip to its chapter, about halfway through the book. Simon Winchester has done an admirable job collecting and collating interviews, logs, diaries, reports, barographs, tide meter readings, you name it, to recreate the the horrific disaster, and set a few earlier errors straight. One observer looks towards the beach, and see a monstrous wave, higher than the palm trees, sweeping along the shore. Others take note of the sea in the strait, writhing and surging, even though there is no wind and no clouds. Sailors caught in the ashfall suffer electric shocks from the charged cloud. A stone residence on a hill 110 feet high is destroyed by a wave that overtopped it by twenty feet. The sea becomes a slick of ash, pumice, debris, and bodies. (Winchester announces that he is censoring himself, in that last detail.) A woman in Ceylon who is killed by a surge is the most distant victim of the volcano. The airwave circles the globe seven times. The violent sunsets are recorded by landscape painters for years afterwards. The run-up to the dramatic parts is a fairly interesting history of the Dutch in the East Indies, stuffed to bursting with footnoted asides. Krakatoa is the focal point throughout, though. Winchester even pinpoints the earliest Dutch map to represent the island, and then the first one to name it. There is an unmistakeably British thatchy-tweedy-fussiness in his manner. Even in the climactic narrative of the disaster, he finds room for a footnote to explain that Macassar was the source for an oil that spoiled wood finish, and necessitated the invention of a lace furniture drapery called an "antimacassar". As for his idea that Krakatoa launched radical Islam in Indonesia, that's probably impossible to prove. The Japanese takeover of Dutch Pacific possessions in World War II, and the Saudi practice of exporting and subsidizing fundamentalist Wahabhi madrassas around the world probably had more to do with it. But it is certainly something to think about. All in all, this is an informative and at times exciting account of one of the biggest and certainly the loudest natural disaster in recorded human history.
Rating:
Summary: Krakatoa - The Book Jacket was cool
Review: While not being of a scientific mind, I found Krakatoa to be very interesting. I loved the illustrations and maps. I found myself writing down words to look up in the dictionary. I have never been one of those people who enjoyed reading history, but with Krakatoa I enjoyed it tremendously. The author really knows his subduction zones!
Rating:
Summary: The death and re-birth of an island.
Review: 'Popular Science' has a slightly pejorative ring to it that is undeserved, as good examples serve to increase general awareness and dispel urban myths - this book is one of those good examples.
Written in Mr. Winchester's energetic, entertaining style, this book is well-researched and peppered with neat little snippets of information and pertinent anecdotes, backed up with solid evidence. He goes into much historical detail about the East Indies and its importance in world trade and politics during the run-up to the cataclysmic explosion that devastated the island.
One quibble; in extolling the virtues of Batavia, he forgets that the place was reviled by seamen in the 18th C (Anson, Cook, Dampier, Davis et al) as a suffocating hell-hole of disease, stench and filth. He examines the explosion of scientific theories that arose in the aftermath of the event, and the small part he played in proving that plate tectonics works (the chapter on The Wallace Line contains the most lucid crash course on plate tectonics I've seen). Most of this has been said before, but the difference here is he attributes the area's political and religious changes directly to the explosion. Some of this information seems extraneous to the main thrust of the book, (e,g, Wallace and Darwin), but it has a purpose ... It serves to underline the tremendous, slow forces that drive plate tectonics (unheard of then), and the devastating results of any blockage. Given all this background data it should come as no surprise to learn that Krakatoa has exploded many times in the geologically recent past (60,000 years), and most assuredly will in the future.
Eruptions are an everyday occurence, but this gigantic 'throat-clearing' was the first global-scale event to be reported within minutes of it happening, and Mr. Winchester draws on many first-hand accounts to describe in horrendous detail the titanic scale of the event. The explosion shook the world to its core, both physically and metaphorically; long-held beliefs of the solidity of the Earth and Man's significance were blown away. Religious and scientific establishments had to re-think their stances; but amazingly, some still clung (and cling now!) to the old immutable doctrines, even in the light of such solid evidence.
The sterile islands that formed in the wake of the explosion were a clean sheet for Nature, and observations of new life colonising them became the new focus of scientific study, in a less human-controlled way than E.O. Wilson did in the Florida Keys. As with most of Mr. Winchester's books, this is a very instructive and entertaining read, thoughtfully & thankfully containing an appendix on further reading, which I recommend to any popular science/history fan. *****
| 
