Krakatoa is one long and scattered digression on the subject of the titanic eruption of 1883. It's a lot of fun, since Winchester has a natural knack as a storyteller and a particular love for geology, but don't expect anything like focus. The story weaves through the spice trade, Dutch colonial policies, telegraphs, the Wallace line separating the biomes of Asia and Australia, and then the history of plate tectonics and the discovery of the source of volcanism along subduction zones, as water rich seabed slides into the mantle, melts, and bubbles upwards.

But if you're interested in the eruption itself, it takes several hundred pages for the story to wind it's way there. And the eruption is a hard thing to write about, so cataclysmic that most of the witnesses died. Though a few survivors carried forward stories of ashfalls at sea, 100 foot tsunamis, and thunderous cracks heard 3000 miles away.

Winchester's thesis, as much as this book has one, is that Krakatoa catalyzed the idea of the global community. News of the disaster spread worldwide in hours along commercial telegraph lines, a dramatic use of a tool more regularly used for reporting shipping news. Victorian recording barometers showed the spreading air shockwave reverberate 14 times around the world from Kratakoa, while tide meters pegged the change in the sea. Sadly, the eruption was also a missed opportunity for science, as geology lacked the theories to understand volcanism, and close biological surveys were understandly absent in the critical early months to see how life returned to the remaining islands of Krakatoa, and the new island of Anakrakatoa, a volcano growing at the rate of 20' per year from the submerged caldera.