Apakah suatu kebanggaan bila sebuah bencana pernah menjadi buah bibir internasional. Belum hilang di benak kita bencana tsunami di Banda Aceh dan sekitarnya yang menelan korban jiwa lebih dari 100.000 jiwa. Oktober 2010 lalu, erupsi Merapi turut menambah catatan bencana terbesar bagi negeri kita ini. Letusan Gunung vulkanik telah lama menjadi langganan bagi wilayah negeri kita. Rekor yang tidak terkalahkan adalah letusan Gunung Toba yang membentuk caldera Danau Toba, serta letusan Gunung Tambora More...

Another masterful book by Simon Winchester. I really enjoyed this one – so much so that I’ve bought a copy for my father for Father’s Day.

When I was in Primary School one of my teachers once spoke about Krakatoa. Most of what he said wasn’t true, for instance, he said that the tidal wave went around the world twice. Naturally, the 8 year old me had visions of a huge wall of water drowning the world. Krakatoa was bad, but not quite Biblical.

Winchester is a pure delight to read. He has such a va More...

What I think about this book?

It was so amazing that I mostly dumbfounded throughout the reading progress. Lots of details -the likes of the history of Batavia, early colonialism, etc- that I think interesting despite my genuine expectation regarding the book was merely about the eruption.

Yet somehow I like the, as a friend said in her review, the OOT parts of this book, for me, quite entertaining. But to be honest not all of them, just a bit.

If somehow Mr. Winchester, you're reading this, you sh More...

I always attracted to history, especially if it has connection with (natural) disasters.

That's why when a book like Krakatoa: The Day The World Exploded got published, I always have an urge to read it (and whenever possible, to buy and add it into my personal library).

I mean, a book such as Krakatoa is like a perfect combo: a history book that tries to fully describe a big disaster, a catastrophe, which is widely believed has major impact and affected history of human kind, especially in the D More...

Jumped up my reading list at the urging of Netstation, who is seldom wrong in recommending books. One of the early chapters of this, detailing the known history of the island, covers some of the same ground and refers to some of the same people (albeit with different spellings) as Nathaniel's Nutmeg, so it felt like a continuation of that not long ago finished story, or as if I'd read a travel guide before visiting. The title and popular imagination think of Krakatoa as a single catclysmic explo More...

This book was a lot like Guns, Germs and Steel in the sense that it connected history, technology, and anthropology together to explain how the explosion of Krakatao affected the entire planet. The book also detailed how this is one event in somewhat recent history that actually affected the ENTIRE world, through weather patterns, dust issues, tsunamis, etc. The explosion itself also brought together different scientists and really increased the understanding of tectonic plates, geophysics, etc. More...

I quite enjoyed this novel. I've read other Simon Winchester books before; the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, the Map of the UK (geological) and have found his interests quite varied. I was somewhat worried at the beginning that this story might be too scientific as he tried to explain tectonic plates and the makings of the Earth, but my fears were unfounded. The story was varied and interesting and got even more so as it got deeper into it. It covered such areas, as the development of More...

Alright, I know I scored this with 3 stars, but that is because it is just LONG and DULL in places.

This book is about the last great Global event right before the modern era of the industrial revolution. You learn so much and gain such an insight into this event that you can't help but feel smarter. Hell, you feel like you've earned your PhD. in Geology or some anthropological earth science by the time you reach the end of this bad mamma-jamma!

If you have a few weeks of your life to waste (pro More...

Dependable historical story telling can be a dry glass in a desert for many readers. Winchester is a very fine writer, fine to the point of absurdum with descriptions that sometime take him down a path that does not always work on the written page. Having heard him speak and listened to his reading of his works it both pushes my rating of this back to 3 stars and down to 3 stars at the same time.

Nothing is left out it seems from this story, but where detail and richness of information is lacking More...

On August 27, 1883, an immense volcano on an island in the Sunda Straits of immense archipelago that was the Dutch East Indies (now called Indonesia) annihilated itself in an explosion that changed the world. Thousands of people in the vicinity of the volcano died right there; many more were made homeless and destitute as a result of it. The shock wave from that titanic explosion manifested as atmospheric pressure waves -- sound waves -- heard thousands of miles away, and the disaster was follow More...

The book does much, much more than consider a single day.

The island of Krakatoa lies between the Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. It is one of the most active volcanic areas of the world, and has erupted repeatedly for much of recorded history. The most cataclysmic of those occurred in 1883, when most of the island (and its 1800 meter peak) disappeared.

The book begins with a somewhat drawn-out historic review of the area and a layman-friendly look at the evolution of theories of continental drift More...

Krakatoa. Krakatoa! Krakatoa.

Simon Winchester does it again. He lured me into purchasing this book because of the subject itself... the monstrous volcanic explosion that became the byword for catastrophe. And once again, Winchester let me down. The man does his homework, he gets the research done, and he has his facts in line.

But. He. Is. Boring.

How can a book about a volcano that obliterated an island and launched a massive killer tsunami be dull? I mean, Charlton Heston should be running thro More...

Among the many non-fiction books that I have read was a book about the eruption of Krakatoa on August 27, 1883 called, “The Day the World Exploded” by Simon Winchester. It was a fascinating book! When this island volcano located between the islands of Java and Sumatra in Sunda Strait erupted it produced the loudest bang in all of recorded history. It was heard over 3,000 miles away (4828km!) and covered 1/13th of the earth’s surface. The pyroclastic flow traveled as far as 40km from the island ( More...

Worth reading but a quite a complex book. Lots of additional details that often got in the way.

The wide range of factors associated with the formation of volcanoes and the specific history connected with the Krakatoa eruptions are facinating. Pre-history, Tectonic Plates ( which I discovered are a very recnt discovery, the global effects of the eruption, the benefical aspects of volcanic activity, and the social factors associated with Indonesia all interlink with the final eruption of Krakatoa More...

On August 27, 1883, the volcanic island of Krakatoa, located in the Sundra Straits in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), exploded. The explosion, devastation, tsunamis, and shock waves killed almost 40,000 people and affected the entire world. Shock waves were detected around the world and high sea waves hit the shores of France and the English Channel. Dust that was hurled miles into the atmosphere from the explosion of the volcano kept full sunlight from reaching the earth, causing global More...

Only superlatives can describe the Volcanic Eruption of the island of Krakatoa that took place on August 27, 1883. In the shallow waters of the Sunda Strait lying between Sumatra and Java, Indonesia or as we learned in school The Dutch East Indies, the 6 cubic miles of uninhabited rock were blasted out of existence. Over 36,000 people perished in the tsunami that followed with thousands more being injured. A cloud of gas and pumice was hurled 24 miles into the air with the debris blocking the ra More...

First let me say that it was the volcano Krakatoa that I wished to read about, and finding lots of background in the first section of the book, I skimmed until page 154 and the start of Krakatoa’s story. So my comments and scoring for this book relate only to pages 154 to 408.
Pages 154 to 408 are page turners, Krakatoa’s story was riveting. It told of the months leading up to the big explosion and often gave the story in the actual words of people who were there and survived. My criticism of thi More...

Prolific American writer Will Durant once said, “Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice” (Winchester 299). These words epitomize Krakatoa, The Day the World Exploded August 27th, 1988. This book was a compelling and intense true story about a volcanic eruption on a tiny island in the Sunda Straight between the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Java. Simon Winchester did a wonderful job of explaining a geographical disaster from the ground up. Initially, Winches More...

I superlative example of a narrative around an event in history, all the things that lead up to it, and how it was perceived later. Reminded me a lot of Jared Diamond. He starts with the earliest records of volcanic studies by Romans; moves onto the spice trade and the reason that the cities nearby were settled by the Dutch, following the Portuguese.

He covers Alfred Russel Wallace who discovered that half the islands there have one distinct set of flora and fauna, while the other half have a di More...

I really wanted this book to be better than it was. While it has a lot of factual information about Krakatoa, it tells the tale with a number of sidetracks and blind alleys rather than in a linear fashion. At many points, it's hard to tell whether the author is relating something that happened before, during, or after the explosion.

And, unfortunately, the explosion itself is a very small portion of the book. Winchester dedicates 64 pages to explaining the origins of continental drift theory. Why More...

This is not just about that famous volcano, Krakatoa, in Indonesia [near Java and Sumatra:]. The book consumed almost 400 pages because it likewise dealt with topics related to the volcano, and volcanoes in general.

There were chapters about spices and the spice trade. Spices are the in thing at that time, and the area where Krakatoa was was where most of the spices were harvested at that time. Naturally, the Europeans competed with each other in this spice trade and somehow it was the Dutch who More...

Over the weekend I read Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883, a book in which Simon Winchester has the gall to make fun of a geographically mistitled film called "Krakatoa, East of Java," while himself failing to provide an adequate map of the region. There are historical maps, there are maps of where the sound of the explosion could be heard, there are numerous diagrams of fault-lines and continental and oceanic plates, and there is even a black-and-white reproduction of a pain More...

I started reading this and kind of zoned out really fast. This is one of those books -- all too common now -- where the chronicler seems hellbent on going back far into time and detailing various tangentially relevant incident before finally deciding to bring it all home somewhere near the end. I'm sure that descriptions of flora and fauna and the history of trade routes have their place, but not to this extent. Why must every author have to be the "chronicler of record" and weigh their books do More...

The book deals with the explosive eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia on August 27, 1883, an event that led to over 36,000 deaths, mostly due to the resulting tsunami, which was heard almost 3,000 miles away, caused spectacular sunsets and affected the climate globally for months--and which Winchester credits with triggering a militant Muslim resurgence that led to rebellion against Dutch colonial rule and eventual independence.

Winchester is a journalist who is a geologist by training More...

I would expect a book about a volcano to include plate tectonics and volcanism but this book is so much more - pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, Greenland, European colonialism, the beginnings of militant Islam, the ending of Dutch imperialism, meteorology, the development of radio, Javanese culture, the European legal system, ballooning spiders, the shipping business, barogrophy, and on and on. Who knew? While this book was at times a bit tedious, it was full of information and a very thorough More...

The reader of this book learns about plate tectonics, bio-diversity, the Wallace Line, and history of the Dutch East Indies Company before reaching the big explosion. Then there's the false start, followed later by the big blast, and then all sorts of stories follow. Then there's more science lessons about tsunamis, shock waves, jet stream, and other stuff. The author strings all these topics together into a most fascinating tale.

I thought the author pushed things a bit too far when he suggested More...

Written in Simon Winchester's fine, digressive, elegant prose, this account of the explosion of Krakatoa Volcano of the coast of Java was extremely enjoyable. Full of fascinating anecdotes about all sorts everything from the spice trade to the woman who left a small elephant in her hotel room the night before the eruption, the book is highly detailed but never dry or boring. Winchester situates the story in the context of many scientific discoveries - the history of plate tectonics, the theory o More...

I really enjoyed the first half of this book discussing the physical and biological history of Krakatoa and Indonesia as well as the history behind those scientific ideas that have slowly helped form the current scientific theories of plate tectonics. The history of colonialism in Indonesia was interesting, and the author's personal connections to the material were very enjoyable. Once the book turned toward the story of the actual explosion and aftermath, however, a lot of it felt very tedious. More...

It would not take a lot of pages to get into the catastrophic effects of the Krakatoa eruption: massive tsunamis, a sound that might never be heard again, the effects of the dust and pumice expelled. What Winchester does to justify the 350 pages of text (and ample illustrations) is give us a history and geology lesson. He explains the tectonic plates and their effects on the world's volcanoes, gives us an historical account of Dutch shipping and colonization, and examines the side effects the er More...

I thoroughly enjoyed this one, a pop history a little more up my alley than 'Cod' turned out to be. Because seriously, which is more exciting, the most awesome and destructive volcanic eruption mankind has ever witnessed, or a fish?
This is really a much broader work of science history than it would appear at first glance; it isn't just about the events of Aug. 27th, 1883. Winchester spends a lot of time working his way up to the eruption, writing of the history of Indonesia and Dutch Colonialis More...