It’s hard to believe that it’s been over a year since I read Krakatoa — The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883, by Simon Winchester. Because I loved that book so much, at some point around Christmas I bought A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. I was not disappointed. Winchester managed again to make plate tectonics quite thrilling. It’s a fabulous book and — like Krakatoa — it’s amazing to learn how much of today’s political, religious, and socio-economic landscape has been influenced by monumental shifts (literally) in the planet’s physical landscape.
I finished the tale of San Francisco’s epic disaster late Sunday night and was pleasantly surprised to find that my fiancée had another of Winchester’s works sitting on one of our bookshelves. I read The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary on Memorial Day. I forgive the author his predilection for obscenely long titles because his writing is so brilliant. This third book was as awesome as the first two I read and I’ve added everything else he’s written to my Amazon wishlist.
