Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester

Simon Winchester’s brilliant
chronicle of the destruction of the Indonesian island of Krakatoa in 1883
charts the birth of our modern world. He tells the story of the unrecognized
genius who beat Darwin to the discovery of evolution; of Samuel Morse, his
code and how rubber allowed the world to talk; of Alfred Wegener, the
crack-pot German explorer and father of geology. In breathtaking detail he
describes how one island and its inhabitants were blasted out of existence
and how colonial society was turned upside-down in a cataclysm whose echoes
are still felt to this day.