In August of 1883, one of the biggest volcanic eruptions in the history of world began. The island of Krakatoa (at least 60,000 years old) was part of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and the eruption annihilated it. It caused a tsunami that killed nearly 40,000 people and the sound it made was heard thousands of miles away. I discussed this with the River Action Environmental Book Club and we found it engrossing. Simon Winchester is an excellent nonfiction writer with popular appeal. Krakatoa was the first major catastrophe that occurred after the invention of the submarine telegraph, so it was instrumental in making the world a “global village”. Volcanoes are probably the origin of the earth’s atmosphere as well as our fertile soils. They are fearsome but also fascinating, destructive but also creative. Winchester is one of those authors that connects the dots–along with the obvious natural sciences, he includes politics, economics, history, religion. literature, movies, journalism, geography. His section on continental drift and plate tectonics was especially interesting because the person who proposed it, Alfred Wegener, was told his ideas (published in 1915) were “dangerous, unsettling, ungodly, and evil”. He died at age 50 having been ridiculed, vilified, and cruelly denied his academic reward. Now Wegener’s ideas are accepted and he’s considered somewhat of a genius. To find out more of about him, read Ending in Ice: The Revolutionary Idea and Tragic Expedition of Alfred Wegener by Roger McCoy, 551.092 MC.
I’m reading Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman right now.
When we last left Morris Morgan, he was high-tailing it out of the town of Marias Coulee to parts unknown. In Work Song, he reappears, ten years later, in the copper mining capital of the world, Butte, Montana.
“Can’t cook but doesn’t bite”.
Humpty Dumpty has had a big fall indeed, and it looks like foul play. So thinks Jack Spratt, the head of the under-staffed and under-funded Nursery Crimes Division of the Reading Police Department. Jack’s getting pressure to wind up the Humpty investigation quickly, in order to make up his recent debacle trying to convice the 3 pigs of pre-meditated murder of the wolf. But the Humpty investigation is raising more questions than answers, and Jack’s whole Nursery Crimes department is on the line.
Andras Levi, a young Jewish man from Budapest, receives a scholarship to study architecture in Paris. While a student in the City of Light, he falls in love with Klara, also a refugee from Budapest.
The Book of Joby by Mark J. Ferrari