"It was early on a warm summer's evening in the 1970s, as I stood in a palm plantation high on a green hillside in western Java, that I saw for the first time, silhouetted against the faint blue hills of faraway Sumatra, the small gathering of islands that is all that remains of what was once a mountain called Krakatoa"
Simon Winchester

Risk: The smoking time-bomb is located on the Sunda Strait, between Java and Sumatra

In this way, Simon Winchester, academically trained as a geologist, who became a science popularizer, a noted journalist and television presenter, introduces the reader to his incredibly informative, fascinating and exemplary book, Krakatoa, The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883. Just coincidentally, it must have been in the 1970s that my husband told me about this fabulous volcanic eruption in the strait of Sunda though he was no vulcanologist, but an ordinary individual for whom the mysterious world we live in held an entrancing fascination.

It was he, just a few months ago, who brought my attention to the book written by Simon Winchester and since I too find the subject of immense fascination, I bought the book. We have such a huge number of books in our library, all arranged neatly enough by type and subject, though nothing like the precision of the Dewey Decimal library system, that we didn't even know we already had a copy of the book. In any event, I began reading it a week ago. Progress is slow, not because the book isn't enrapturing, and fantastically well written by a master story-teller, but because there is such a wealth of information contained in it, from geoscience, biology and historical scientific discoveries that it compels the reader to linger, savouring and taking it all in.

I've been so taken by the book and its masterly introduction to so many elements of the geohistory of our planet that I continually gush praise for it to my husband. For Simon Winchester has written with this book a masterpiece of historical scientific data collection for the uninitiated, from that archaic period when the world's continents had not yet divided from their single state, to the peculiar geological boundaries separating species' evolution and the discovery of the reality of tectonic plates and their movements.

All of these issues are hugely relevant to the topic at hand, the immense explosion of a volcano under pressure from the boiling magma of the Earth's interior. And to read the book is to try to understand what immense forces of nature come into play when such incredible natural phenomena occur. Beyond the pedestrian imagination of most people, but patiently placed into context by Mr. Winchester. My husband, intrigued by my descriptions of what I've been reading under the influence of this writer's masterly scientific prose, stimulated him to look for that other copy of the book. And he is now engaged in reading it himself, simultaneously to my own bedtime reading.

Ominous glow: In 1883, more than 36,0000 people died when Krakatoa erupted - today, thousands more farmers live near the volcano

"Krakatoa's final twenty hours and fifty-six minutes were marked by a number of phases. First, from early afternoon on Sunday until about 7 p.m. there was a series of explosions and eruptions of steadily increasing frequency and vigor. From early evening the ash fell and the deluge of pumice began. By 8 p.m. the water had become the next medium of transmission of the volcanic energy and as night fell the temper of the sea in the Sunda Strait became one of unbridled ferocity.
"Then, just before midnight, a series of air waves -- fast moving, low-frequency shocks sent out invisibly and inaudibly by the detonations -- began arriving in Batavia. The time-ball on the astronomical clock down at Batavia's harbor stopped dead at eighteen seconds after 11:32 p.m. because of the ceaseless vibrations. Audible evidence of the explosions began to radiate outward too, and there was a report from Singapore and Penang that thudding sounds could be heard at about the same time In Batavia a large number of people, kept awake by the explosions and for want of something better to do, were walking around the Koningsplein; they noticed that the gas lanterns suddenly dimmed at about 1:55 a.m. Along Rijswijk, the main shopping street, several shop windows suddenly and inexplicably shattered at about the same time.....
"In the aftermath of Krakatoa's eruption, 165 villages were devastated, 36, 417 people died, and uncountable thousands were injured -- and almost all of them, villages and inhabitants, were victims not of the eruption directly but of the immense sea-waves that were propelled outward from the volcano by that last night of detonations."

Firestorm: In an awesome display of flaming lava and molten ash, Anak Krakatoa - the child of Krakatoa - reveals its latent power. In recent years, eruptions have steadily grown in intensity