Word: rafflesia
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Winchester is an extraordinarily graceful writer. He may be the world's greatest crafter of smooth transitions, and he has the good sense never to resist an irresistible digression. His footnotes feature, among other gems, cameos by the world's largest flower (the yard-wide Rafflesia arnoldii) and the world's longest book (the Javanese Book of Kings, 6 million words long). Above all, Winchester is delightfully alert to history's ironies and synchronicities. The destruction of Krakatoa occurred just as the global net of telegraph cables--the Victorian version of the Internet--was being completed, and the disaster became...
...than California; Java has more people than the American Midwest. Mountains march down the spines of both islands, and a hundred volcanoes drift their smoke against the blue tropical sky. Indonesia bursts with resources, from copra and hemp to teak, tobacco and oil. The world's largest flower, rafflesia, with a diameter of 3 ft., blooms on Madura. The red-brown soil of Java (pop. 52,000,000), terraced with unbelievable ingenuity, produces two rice crops a year. The warm seas send long rollers crashing on the palm-fringed shores of Ternate, with its burgeoning fields of nutmeg...
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