A global history of the climate catastrophe caused by the Tambora eruption When Indonesia's Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, it unleashed the most destructive wave of extreme weather the world has witnessed in thousands of years. The volcano’s massive sulfate dust cloud enveloped the Earth, cooling temperatures and disrupting major weather systems for more than three years. Communities worldwide endured famine, disease, and civil unrest on a catastrophic scale. Here, Gillen D’Arcy Wood traces Tambora’s global and historical reach: how the volcano’s three-year climate change regime initiated the first worldwide cholera pandemic, expanded opium markets in China, and plunged the United States into its first economic depression. Bringing the history of this planetary emergency to life, Tambora sheds light on the fragile interdependence of climate and human societies to offer a cautionary tale about the potential tragic impacts of drastic climate change in our own century. "Winner of the 2015 Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize, Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts" "Honorable Mention for the 2014 ASLI Choice Award in History, Atmospheric Science Librarians International" "One of The Times Higher Education Supplement’s Books of the Year 2014, chosen by Alison Stokes" "One of The Guardian’s Best Popular Physical Science Books of 2014, chosen by GrrlScientist" "This engaging interdisciplinary study links Tambora's disruption of global weather patterns not only to Arctic melting, famine, and cholera but to the landscape paintings of William Turner, the debts that plagued Thomas Jefferson near the end of his life, the elegiac verse of the Chinese poet Li Yuyang, and Mary Shelley's novel 'Frankenstein,' written in 1816, the 'Year without a Summer.' The lessons of Tambora's 'Frankenstein weather'--as Wood is quick to point out--may carry special weight in today's era of climate upheaval." ― The New Yorker "Wood, who intends no hyperbole in his subtitle, makes a convincing case for Tambora's role in causing 'the most catastrophic sustained weather crisis of the millennium.'" ---Thomas Jones, London Review of Books "Persuasively entertaining. . . . If not the first, Mr. Wood's book is by far the best on the subject, and most comprehensive. What Mr. Wood has achieved in Tambora is to uncover, collect, and collate a great deal of new scientific evidence to bolster his case." ---Simon Winchester, Wall Street Journal "The greatest volcanic eruption of modern times occurred in 1815 on the small island of Tambora in the East Indies. It spawned the most extreme weather in thousands of years. In what contemporaries described as the 'year without a summer,' its immense ash cloud encircled and cooled the Earth. While historians have mostly ignored the decades of worldwide misery, starvation, and disease that followed, Wood ( The Shock of the Real ), professor of English at the University of Illinois, remedies this oversight, combining a scientific introduction to volcanism with a vivid account of the eruption's cultural, political, and economic impact that persisted throughout the century." ― Publishers Weekly "Wood broadens our understanding beyond the 'year without a summer' cliché. . . . Wood's command of the scientific literature is impressive, and more than matched by his knowledge of world history during this horrific episode of catastrophic global climate change. With the mass of information he has assimilated, he skillfully weaves a tale full of human and cultural interest." ---Ted Nield, Nature "The book is fluently-written, tightly constructed around a single event and a short time period, filled with interesting anecdotes about both well-known and obscure people, places, and evetns, and connects less-than-obvious dots. . . . [F]ascinating and easy-to-read. . . . Tambora is also interesting as a timely reminder of how interconnected our world is." ---Peter Gordon, Asian Review of Books "[Tambora's] portentous lessons on the consequences of global climate disturbances, is told with particular élan and a flair for the dramatic in Gillen D'Arcy Wood's Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World . . . . Wood uncovers for the reader the worldwide reaches of the eruption and makes it a watershed date in the timeline of human history." ---William O'Connor, The Daily Beast "Even Westerners who were aware of the occasional spewings of Italy's Mount Vesuvius (much smaller eruptions that didn't change climate at all) had no idea what a volcano on the other side of the globe was capable of doing. Today, Wood . . . can put it into a worldwide context of environmental and social upheaval." ---Nancy Szokan, Washington Post "[T]his is a subject worthy of much thought. Tambora is the most far-reaching account of it yet, and D'Arcy Wood deserves a wide and serious readership for his audacious book . . . a grand case study. . . . It is a brave literary scholar who taken on volcanology, meteoro