Journeys of Frodo by Barbara Strachey

Journeys of Frodo : An Atlas of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings
Barbara Strachey
ill. Barbara Strachey
(HarperCollins, London: 1998)

First published in Great Britain by George Allen & Unwin, 1981.

READ: February 2008

I love books.

I love maps.

I love the Lord of the Rings.

Therefore, it logically follows that were there a book of maps based on the travels in the Lord of the Rings, I would love that, too. Journeys of Frodo, happily, proves this hypothesis.

In this marvelous gem of an atlas, what Strachan has done is gone through all of J.R.R. Tolkien's writings related to the Lord of the Rings, and matched up descriptions to detailed maps. Tolkien was largely consistent in his descriptions, but he occasionally gave conflicting evidence, and in those cases, Strachan has done her best to reconcile differing accounts. While you won't find a story, per se, in the pages of this book, it is a lovely complement to anyone who wishes to have a deeper, more detailed understanding of Middle-Earth and the travels of the Fellowship.

Krakatoa: The Day The World Exploded: August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester

Krakatoa: The Day The World Exploded: August 27, 1883
Simon Winchester
(HarperCollins, New York: 2003)

First published by Viking, Great Britain: 2003.

READ: July-August 2007

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: Winchester could make the phone book interesting, I swear.

While not quite as entertaining as A Crack in the Edge of the World, Krakatoa is a fascinating look into the insides of this infamous Indonesian volcano, and the devastation it wrought over 100 years ago. As a trained geologist, Winchester knows what he's talking about, and as a trained journalist, he knows how to make his story interesting. The story was hard to initially piece together, and Winchester has done a formidable job. It was the first modern volcanic explosion of such a ferocious magnitude. Vulcanologists (yes, they are really called that) didn't really exist yet, and those geologists who did have an interest in volcanoes didn't really know what made them tick. There were also very few survivors, and virtually no eyewitness accounts. Furthermore, while very few people actually died as a direct result of the volcanic explosion itself (Krakatoa was a volcanic island unto itself, so there was no Pompeii villagers waiting to be buried), the death toll skyrocketed after a series of devastating tsunamis hit the surrounding Javan and Sumatran shores. We don't even understand tsunamis today, let alone back in 1883. Beyond the actual devastation, of course, is the science of why it all happened - why did Krakatoa explode? - and that is where Winchester, like he did in A Crack in the Edge of the World, truly shines. If plate tectonics and the inner workings of the mantle core had been presented to me in such an interesting manner back in my early school days, I might have chosen a quite different career.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Jared Diamond
(W.W. Norton, New York: 1997)
includes Afterword dated 2003

READ: March 2005

I'd been hearing about this book for quite a while before I finally read it, and it was definitely worth it. Jared Diamond is not a historian but a professor of physiology, and he tackles his historical subject accordingly. Rather than telling us what has happened to get us to where we are, he tries to tackle the deeper root causes; that is, why have modern-day societies ended up where they are?

Obviously this is a complicated question. Rather than basing his answers on ideas of race, culture or other such related notions of ethnicity or linguistics, Diamond points toward the natural and environmental resources that were available in each region of the world, allowing some societies to easily flourish and others to eventually perish. There is a reason apart from the nature of human beings themselves to explain why things have turned out the way they did. Food production played a large role in this: some regions of the world did not lend themselves easily to farming those items deemed necessary for the stabilization of populations - e.g., wild cereals - and there was thus no impetus to consider these alternate forms of food production. The same can be said for the domestication of animals - there just weren't, for a myriad of reasons, as many easily-domesticated wild animals in North America, for example, as there were in Europe. Diamond also points to the axes upon which knowledge about crops and farming expanded - to a large degree, it is
much easier to "transplant" farming techniques practiced in central Asia into central Europe, and vice-versa. The east-west axis of Asia and Europe provided for a huge geographical advantage versus other continents such as Africa and both of the Americas, all of which are predominantly north-south.

While there are certainly many other factors that have led to the modern-day political, economic and social structure of the world, Diamond does raise some interesting points. If you've been avoiding it because it was slightly over-hyped, take my word for it: it is worth the read.