The subtitle pretty much tells the story here, except maybe you could substitute catalog for history. Author Withington has assembled accounts of an extensive collection of disasters, both natural and man-made, going back 74,000 years (when a volcano erupted in what’s now known as Sumatra, wiping out, or so some theories suggest, as much as 99 percent of the world’s population). Here are tsunamis, earthquakes, terrorist acts, extreme weather, diseases, famine—there are at least 100 disaster movies aching to be made from the pages of this book. But disaster movies have characters, stories, drama. This book does not. Withington writes about exciting events, but doesn’t write about them in an exciting way, describing what happened but not engaging us in the drama. His prose is lean and efficient but sterile and uninvolving. Still, this is a solid, workmanlike survey of the world’s disastrous history. If you want the personal touch, try Robert Harris’ gripping novel Pompeii (2003), in which the actual volcanic eruption is described in vivid, dramatic prose. --David Pitt
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