With Krakatoa Simon Winchester gives a very interesting account not only of the actual eruption of the Krakatoa and its immediate aftermath, but also spend a lot of time to set the scene and look into consequences of the eruption. It was the first book I read by Simon Winchester and I enjoyed it a l...
...for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings—the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance to itself, and then perhaps shedding them as public mood dictates.” Herbert Coleridge whose bril...
An interesting book, though perhaps not as compelling as it might have been. Winchester seems to vacillate a bit between wanting to write a technical book on the geothermal workings of the planet and wanting instead to write a narrative history populated by individual people who witnessed or were af...
Simon Winchester has elevated the language of science to the language of poetry. His eloquence will hold the attention of and also captivate the reader with his brilliant explanation of the formation of the earth, the ocean floor, the plates that shift and slide to wreak havoc or as he might say cau...
A fascinating but somewhat unnerving read as is it deals with the possibility of a monster earthquake and resulting tsunami hitting the west coast of the Americas and the mindboggling damage that would entail.
14/7 - Despite the title this book didn't have that much to do with The Surgeon of Crowthorne or the murder of an innocent man which he committed whilst in a psychotic state. That was just a platform for Winchester to give the history of the Oxford English Dictionary - actually a more interesting to...
I picked up The Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories under the mistaken belief that it was a history book about the Atlantic World. When I mentioned to my mother, an early American historian, that I was reading a book blurbed as "the...
For much of my reading of this book I've been all "squee" over science and science history. However! I am still the same person who bought and read Death in Yellowstone and Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon (seriously, you would not believe the stupid things people do in these parks), so I ca...
The book deals with the explosive eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia on August 27, 1883, an event that led to over 36,000 deaths, mostly due to the resulting tsunami, which was heard almost 3,000 miles away, caused spectacular sunsets and affected the climate globally for months--and whic...
The making of the Oxford dictionary. This person was creative and just asked a lot of persons to help out in the project. Sending him scripts and making up sentences while he edit and picked the usable entry. Very entertaining read.
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