KRAKATOA: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883
&
A CRACK IN THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
Written by Simon Winchester
Two reasons why reading both Krakatoa & A Crack in the Edge of the World makes for a worthwhile experience…
(1) The research — incredibly thorough, minutely detailed, highly organized…but easily presented in a concise, relaxed manner & prose style. You never once feel overwhelmed by information, yet it doesn’t exist to merely act as a boring old info dump (I’m looking at you, DaVinci Code). These are works of research that warm the hearts of anyone who thinks good research — both fascinating AND easily understood by the masses — is a dying art.
(2) The storytelling component is wonderful. There’s a reason that Krakatoa in particular was chosen by the BBC to be turned into a docu-drama for television. The research is always telling a story. All the facts, all the observations, all the measurements…they’re all presented to us via the lives of the memorable people most affected by the disasters related in each book. It’s easy to becomes swept away — more than once — by the awesome, terrifying power of nature. It’s also a perversely joyous feeling to realize that real-life presents us with the better disaster stories than anything Jerry Bruckheimer can produce for film or TV.
Two reasons why Krakatoa & A Crack in the Edge of the World are incredibly frustrating reads…
(1) Tangents, tangents…tangets everywhere you look. Is it a history book? A science book? A geography treatise? A personal memoir? The problem is that it’s primarily history, bamboozled on all sides side by memories, science & geography…and not in a pleasant manner. Just when things get interesting, side-bars explaining how we got to this point seem to go on for ages and ages…sometimes, a glacial age! Many of the side-bars are interesting in their own right, but they are always too long (on one occasion, UNBEARABLY long), and always seem to break the main action at the most inopportune moments. Very much like George Lucas’ less-than-desirable additions to his original Star Wars films…
(2) The occasional “What the hell is he thinking?” moment at the conclusion of both books…particularly Krakatoa, where the author makes an audacious (at times, even astonishing) attempt to somehow link the rise of nationalistic Islamic fervor in South-East Asia to the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano and its aftermath. I’m not necessarily dismissing the entire theory, but it’s presented to us in such a fait accompli manner that it makes the mind (and the eyes) boggle. Ambition is one thing, but this kind of reaching is an entirely different ball game…
Read them, enjoy them, be frustrated by the experience. It’s all worth it in the end, especially if you’re both a history junkie and a connoisseur of epic cataclysm. But be prepared to hold your nose as you turn more than one of their pages…
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