I was hoping to like this book more than I did, but Winchester's willingness to go down all sorts of sidetrack paths was quite frankly exhausting, so it's taken me close to two months to wade through it. I picked it up because Book Riot's Read Harder challenge for this year had, as one of its tasks, to read a book about a natural disaster. A volcanic eruption sounded exciting enough... and, credit where it's due, once the author actually got round to the eruption things moved more at pace and I was far more interested. It's the 150 odd pages of wandering background that comes before this that tried my patience. To give what I think is a particularly annoying example: there is a chapter in here with the appealing title of "The Curious Case of the Terrified Elephant." Well, goodness knows I'd never willingly terrify an elephant myself, but a quick glance at the table of contents before I started reading made me think that chapter was going to be an interesting one. Little did I know... the elephant is mentioned, for the first time, on the penultimate page of that chapter. What filled up the bulk of it? The history of the circus, a frozen meat company, a rivalry between two clubs as to who could hold the better ball, a man who made a living catching cannonballs, and a fight at a hotel. Nothing about the damn elephant, and very little about the volcano. What I'm saying is that the book suffers from lack of focus, and if Winchester could have confined himself to what I actually wanted to read about - namely the erupting volcano, you know, that thing on the cover - the book might have been half the length and twice as entertaining.

That being said, the chapter, towards the end, on the biological recovery of the Krakatoa islands was the best of the lot. That I really enjoyed.