Witze and Kanipe: Island on Fire
THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF A FORGOTTEN VOLCANO
THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
Alexandra Witze (NASW member) and Jeff Kanipe
Pegasus Books, January 14, 2015, $26.95
ISBN: 978-1-60598-674-6
Witze reports:
I got the idea for this book, my first, while rattling around on the back roads of Iceland with a couple of graduate students from Reykjavik in the summer of 2010. I had flown to Iceland in the wake of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption to report for Science News on why ice-covered volcanoes produced so much ash. Near the end of a long day servicing GPS stations to monitor future eruptions, one of the students waved causally toward the lava-encrusted landscape to the east. Over there, he said, was the site of the 18th-century Laki eruption, which killed one-fifth of Icelanders and sent toxic gases rolling across Europe for months.
Hold it, I thought. How come I’ve never heard of Laki?
Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe
We used my husband’s agent, who had a hard time finding a U.S. publisher. Eventually, we landed a contract with Profile Books in London, which in turn sold both a U.S. and an Estonian edition.
We had several things going for us in writing the Laki book, and not only that the volcano’s name was a lot easier to pronounce than Eyjafjallajökull. Many of the key documents were recently translated from Icelandic into English. There is also a renewed scientific interest in the eruption: a recent series of papers laid out how the eruption progressed, and how its cloud of sulfur particles poisoned people across Europe, ultimately shutting down the African monsoon. Millions of people may have died from crop failures, famine, and other climate change linked to Laki's eruption.
Although not in our marketing plan, Iceland cooperated by having another volcano erupt in August 2014. That eruption, called Bardarbunga, is like Laki in miniature. It is spewing out high levels of sulfur gas, and has spurred comparisons with Laki that we have been able to capitalize on in promoting the book.
Contact info:
- Alexandra Witze: 720-334-7160, awitze@gmail.com, http://www.alexandrawitze.com
- Publicist: Jessica Case, 212-504-2924, jessica@pegasusbooks.us
- Agent: Regula Noetzli, 518-398-6260, noetzli@optimum.net
- Book website: http://www.lakithebook.com
NASW members: Will your book be published soon? Take advantage of this opportunity for shameless self-promotion.
Tell your fellow NASW members how you came up with the idea for your book, developed a proposal, found an agent and publisher, funded and conducted research, and put the book together. Include what you wish you had known before you started this project, or had done differently.
See https://www.nasw.org/advance-copy-submission-guidelines.
Send info and images to Lynne Lamberg, NASW book editor, llamberg@nasw.org.
