Word: krakatoa
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...explosion of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines was the largest eruption in recent memory, and its effects on the atmosphere are still being measured. The 1883 eruption of Indonesia's Krakatoa led to a global cooling and the deadly winter of 1886-87 that wiped out the short-lived open-range cattle bonanza of Montana Territory. In 2000, Ken Wohletz, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, postulated that an even bigger Krakatoa eruption in 6th century A.D. may have sent a tall plume of vaporized seawater into the atmosphere, causing the formation of stratospheric ice clouds with superfine hydrovolcanic...
...Vulcans--a campaign 2000 nickname for George W. Bush's hawkish national security team--went Krakatoa last week. Dick Cheney erupted on the Senate floor, deploying the F word against Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, who had been belaboring the Vice President over the no-bid deals that Cheney's old company, Halliburton, had scored in Iraq. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz suffered a meltdown in a House Armed Services Committee hearing, blasting the press for "sitting in Baghdad" and "printing rumors." (He later apologized.) And the White House was forced to acknowledge that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had approved...
...Vulcans-a campaign 2000 nickname for George W. Bush's hawkish national security team-went Krakatoa last week. Dick Cheney erupted on the Senate floor, deploying the F word against Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, who had been belaboring the Vice President over the no-bid deals that Cheney's old company, Halliburton, had scored in Iraq. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz suffered a meltdown in a House Armed Services Committee hearing, blasting the press for "sitting in Baghdad" and "printing rumors." (He later apologized.) And the White House was forced to acknowledge that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had approved...
...Krakatoa, Winchester has found not only a rich subject but also an able collaborator. This is an island that knew how to build tension. European spice traders fought over the Indonesian archipelago for centuries. The Dutch (mostly) came out on top, and the islands' riches gave rise to the world's first joint-stock company and the world's first corporate logo. Winchester deftly evokes the sleepy rhythms of 19th century colonial life--the hotel bars, the town gossip, a runaway elephant--which go on even as volcanic tremors begin knocking plates off tables, shrouding ships in ash and making...
...digression. His footnotes feature, among other gems, cameos by the world's largest flower (the yard-wide Rafflesia arnoldii) and the world's longest book (the Javanese Book of Kings, 6 million words long). Above all, Winchester is delightfully alert to history's ironies and synchronicities. The destruction of Krakatoa occurred just as the global net of telegraph cables--the Victorian version of the Internet--was being completed, and the disaster became the world's first mass-media news sensation. "Millions of people hitherto unknown to one another," he writes, "began to involve themselves, for the first time ever...