[REVIEW] Simon Winchester's Krakatoa
Jan. 11th, 2005 06:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI first encountered the author Simon Winchester in my early teens when I found his Korea, a journey on foot across the breadth of South Korea north to the DMZ, on the shelves at the Confederation Centre Public Library. It's a very good book, well-sourced and well-written and personalized, perhaps even be a sterling example of creative non-fiction.
One of his more recent books--Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded August 27 1883--has taken on a sadly unexpected importance for us 21st century folk, given the recent from the latest geological catastrophe centered in the Indonesian archipelago. I wasn't thinking of the Indian Ocean tsunami when I took Krakatoa out from the Yorkville library yesterday; the connections only came to me last night. This famous eruption deserves a good book to introduce it to the relatively uninformed reader.
Fortunately, Krakatoa does just this. Winchester is a good stylist, and an excellent researcher, bringing together all manner of contemporary and current anecdotes--his discovery of a Dutch engraving purporting to depict Krakatoa's 1680 eruption, the upset shown by a dwarf elephant attached to a travelling circus in then-Batavia just before the eruption, the death in Arctic exploration of Alfred Russell Wegener--to form a coherent whole. Winchester places the eruption in its various contexts: the geological (the Indonesian archipelago's tectonic instabilities, the development of plate tectonics theory in the 1960s); the human (the lives and communities destroyed by the volcanic explosion); the historical (the eruption's impact on emerging incoherent Indonesian anticolonial attitudes, its illumination of a world only recently united by instantaneous telegraphic communication). By Krakatoa's end, the reader has been superbly introduced to the devastating volcanic eruption in the Sunda Straits one pleasant summer day in the 1880s, and to its general ramifications.
(It's worth noting, after Winchester, that tectonic activities are needed in order for Earth to be a lifebearing world. Plate tectonics--manifested most obviously to humans by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions--recycle the Earth's crust, allowing the Earth's surface to constantly regenerate itself (as Neil Hoffman notes), releasing internal heat and recycling crustal materials. Without plate tectonics, Earth might well be as lifeless as Venus or Mars.)
One of his more recent books--Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded August 27 1883--has taken on a sadly unexpected importance for us 21st century folk, given the recent from the latest geological catastrophe centered in the Indonesian archipelago. I wasn't thinking of the Indian Ocean tsunami when I took Krakatoa out from the Yorkville library yesterday; the connections only came to me last night. This famous eruption deserves a good book to introduce it to the relatively uninformed reader.
Fortunately, Krakatoa does just this. Winchester is a good stylist, and an excellent researcher, bringing together all manner of contemporary and current anecdotes--his discovery of a Dutch engraving purporting to depict Krakatoa's 1680 eruption, the upset shown by a dwarf elephant attached to a travelling circus in then-Batavia just before the eruption, the death in Arctic exploration of Alfred Russell Wegener--to form a coherent whole. Winchester places the eruption in its various contexts: the geological (the Indonesian archipelago's tectonic instabilities, the development of plate tectonics theory in the 1960s); the human (the lives and communities destroyed by the volcanic explosion); the historical (the eruption's impact on emerging incoherent Indonesian anticolonial attitudes, its illumination of a world only recently united by instantaneous telegraphic communication). By Krakatoa's end, the reader has been superbly introduced to the devastating volcanic eruption in the Sunda Straits one pleasant summer day in the 1880s, and to its general ramifications.
(It's worth noting, after Winchester, that tectonic activities are needed in order for Earth to be a lifebearing world. Plate tectonics--manifested most obviously to humans by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions--recycle the Earth's crust, allowing the Earth's surface to constantly regenerate itself (as Neil Hoffman notes), releasing internal heat and recycling crustal materials. Without plate tectonics, Earth might well be as lifeless as Venus or Mars.)
