Best-selling author of Krakatoa, The Professor and the Madman, and The Fracture Zone, Simon Winchester studied geology at Oxford. He has written about the Amur River for National Geographic magazine, the South Pacific for a National Geographic book, and a voyage on a Russian tramp steamer from Antarctica to England for National Geographic Adventure. Simon recently completed A Crack in the Edge of the World, the dramatic story of the great San Francisco earthquake. He is an entertaining lecturer with as many tales as stamps in his passport.