When Indonesia's Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, it unleashed the most destructive wave of extreme weather the world has witnessed in thousands of years. The volcano's massive sulfate dust cloud enveloped the Earth, cooling temperatures and disrupting major weather systems for more than three years. Communities worldwide endured famine, disease, and "I learned an awful lot from this book, about a number of subjects that, on reading the title, I wouldn't have expected. . . . Wood has done a worthy job of portraying the human suffering caused by, in this case, a short-lived global climatic shift."---John Brittan, The Leading Edge