A broken plate, an almighty bang.

It's a good thing that I'm a sound sleeper. I wasn't roused when an earthquake in southern Illinois apparently sent tremors as far north as this region, but had I been I would have given up reading for good. I happened to be deep into Simon Winchester's Krakatoa at the time, and the possibility that perhaps I'm getting a bit too involved in my reading material immediately crossed my mind. Life imitating literature would, in this case at least, be a bit too much, even for me.

My edginess stemmed from the depiction Winchester gives the catastrophic eruption of the Indonesian island of Krakatoa in 1883. At the time that it occurred, the islands of modern day Indonesia were under the colonial rule of the Dutch, centered at Batavia (today's Jakarta), on the island of Java. At the very center of the Dutch holdings was Krakatoa, straddling the very busy shipping lanes between the west coast of Java and the eastern point of Sumatra. Unbeknownst to the Dutch masters or the Javanese population, Krakatoa was also at the very center of a tectonic plate boundary, and a very active one at that. The volcano had belched minor eruptions in the past, but on the morning of August 23, 1883, an eruption occurred that vaporized Krakatoa, triggered an immense tsunami, chilled world temperatures for years and was directly responsible for the deaths of at least 30,000 people, as well as coining a new word for a cataclysm.

As Winchester would have it, the eruption also had a lasting impact on global communications, and possibly sparked the growing global Islamic fundamentalist movement. To be certain, Krakatoa's spectacular demise did have global implications (the declining world temperatures on the negative side, the fantastic sunsets that inspired poets and artists to create some fabulous artwork). But even though Krakatoa's eruption occurred at the dawn of the communication age, and Indonesia experienced a surge in sectarian violence, the connection seems more than a little tenuous to me. The lack of much in the way of sources in this portion of the book is telling.

But, thankfully, most of the book focuses on Winchester's strength: the depiction of why and how Krakatoa so completely blew its top. A trained geologist, Winchester describes in loving detail the science behind plate tectonics, as well as the different biological and geological boundaries that led to the acceptance of the theory--too late for the 1883 explosion, but oh so beneficial in predicting upcoming events. The geological details are couched in the history of the region, culminating in a vivid depiction of Java and Batavia in the days leading up to and during Krakatoa's final days.

When I say details, I do really mean details: Winchester is fond of footnotes explaining perhaps too much about certain points, and they're almost all tangential to the main narrative and in some cases, reiterates points made earlier in the text. He's also prone to polysyllabic indulgences, a trait perhaps not so surprising for a man who wrote two histories of the Oxford English Dictionary, but do we really need to say 'ambuscade' when 'ambush' would do? And some readers may find Winchester's humorous asides to be too glib, detracting from an otherwise straightforward narrative.

For all its faults, Krakatoa not only makes some difficult concepts accessible, but entertaining. Illustrated with historical and contemporary images, the book never fails to give a vivid image of the horrendous toll that the volcano wrought on the entire planet. Written in 2003, Krakatoa was published before the massive earthquake and tsunami originating on the northern coast of Sumatra (occurring along the same plate boundary that Krakatoa rests on), but reading it in retrospect it only continues to underscore how interconnected we are when it comes to the Earth's life cycles.