My first ounce of deliberate, non-walking exercise in several weeks. I climbed on the stairmill for 15', ran one mile (only one, but at a steeper incline than previously), and did some weights, concentrating on my back, core, and quadriceps. It felt good.
I loved The Professor and the Madman and The Meaning of Everything. I hoped Mary Anne's just criticism that in the former, Simon Winchester sometimes sounded like the madman Victorian colonial he was describing--in being patronizing and racist, if not psychotic--was not a constant element of his writing.
This book is an erudite, wide-ranging work whose exploding world, centered on a volcano, is developed through topics ranging from geology to colonialism to meteorology. With flaws. Fascinating: Krakatoa was the first global catastrophe to happen after the telegraph had connected the world, and news of it reached London only three hours after the eruption (by contrast, news of Lincoln's assassination 18 years before had taken 12 days to reach England). Frustrating: lizards and snakes are not amphibians.* Fascinating: in the early 1800s, a biologist traced a line through southeast Asia, east and west of which lay distinctly different flora and fauna; that line correlates to how landmasses have drifted over time, anticipating the theory of plate tectonics of 1965. Frustrating: Winchester footnotes that the New York World newspaper, which after the eruption noted more vivid sunsets, is the paper of "World Series" fame (as if the championship took its name from the paper's sponsorship, 288), but other, apparently more trustworthy (though online) sources deny this, and the paper's own archives show no connection.
Offhand, careless mistakes like those, and larger ones like his persistently (in Madman and in this, more than once) referring to Sri Lanka by its pre-1952 name, Ceylon**, make me wonder if I should not have enjoyed the book overall, if any of what I thought I learned (about continental drift, subduction zones, the repopulation of Krakatoa's relics) is trustworthy and accurate.
* "And as the forest thickened, some amphibians that had somehow found their ways across the sea begin to slink in and make their nests--monitor lizards, paradise tree snakes" (364).
** While Sri Lanka was Ceylon, Taiwan was Formosa. Why then in the same note (33), would he refer to "Dutch outposts" in Ceylon, Formosa, and Thailand, not Siam? Why call Sri Lanka "Ceylon" several times despite seeming to be aware of (not only) a name change ("what was then Ceylon," 262)? This despite acknowledging an assiduous editor and fact-checker.
I was almost 12 when Mount St. Helens erupted. I think I knew about Krakatoa earlier than that, that a story about it appeared in a Reader's Digest collection for children that I read to tatters. But it fit well with what I think is a typical pubescent fascination with the weird, scary, unknown, or extreme. I could not read much this week with three houseguests, but I tried to engage RDC's 12-year-old nephew's interest with Krakatoa. That it was so loud it could be heard 3000 miles away, as if you yelled in New York City and could be heard in San Francisco. That sunsets were prettier all over the world because an entire pulverized mountain was suspended in the upper atmosphere. That it caused tsunamis taller than the one of two years ago, whose effects registered on tidal markers in France. That the barometric shock wave reverberated around the globe 15 times. Sadly, none of this stirred him at all.
Vocabulary: chicane, threnody.