Terra Tales Of The Earth Four Events That Changed The World

1755. An earthquake demolishes Lisbon. 1783. Europe is blanketed by toxic fog. 1883. Krakatau erupts. 1946. Hilo is devastated by a Pacific-wide tsunami. We live on the surface of a planet with an inexhaustible capacity for destruction, and over the centuries natural disasters have, intermittently, served to remind us of this. In Terra, Richard Hamblyn paints a vivid portrait of the four events above; their drama and scale, their inevitability and indiscriminate damage. Blending history, science and eye-witness accounts, he reveals the irony at the heart of our relationship with our planet: that it`s not its extraordinary destructive potential that is so troubling, but the fact that it always seems to catch us unprepared.