Vulcan's fury: Man against the volcano

I read this book on an 11‐hour flight back from a field trip in the Andes, where I got first‐hand insight into how people live with a volcano that now and then explodes. Appropriate reading, I felt, especially as the fascination of the human world with volcanoes and eruptive disasters is indeed long standing. This book is a recent addition to a list of titles in this genre (e.g., the new book by Sigurdsson to be reviewed in Eos shortly). The scope of the book is summarized in the introductory sentence of the preface: “This book is about an unequal contest. It describes human reactions to volcanic eruptions.” This is the perspective of the book's descriptions of 16 large and not‐so‐large eruptions over the last two millennia.