Simon Winchesters 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 & how rubber allowed the world to talk; of Alfred Wegener the crack-pot German explorer & father of geology. In breathtaking detail he describes how one island & its inhabitants were blasted out of existence & how colonial society was turned upside-down in a cataclysm whose echoes are still felt to this day.