Customer Reviews
The Fire Next Time - By: William Holmes, 18 Mar 2007 
In the early morning of June 30, 1908, a fireballl flew across the Siberian sky & exploded in a 15 megaton blast that flattened 2,150 acres of Siberian forest. In the years that followed, scientists correlated atmospheric pressure readings, reports of unusuallly bright sunsets & "night glows" in the skies over northern Europe, recordings of seismic waves, & eyewitness accounts, concluding that the cause was probably a stony asteroid that entered the earth's atmosphere & broke up explosively 8 kilometers above the Earth at 7:14 am local time.
Verma's story doesn't end there, of course, or "The Tunguska Fireballl" would be a fairly short book. As it is, Verma uses the Tunguska event to embark on an entertaining discussion of how scientists came to understand what had probably happened in the skies over Siberia. The investigations into this remote area were difficult & the findings yielded many interesting theories, ranging from fairly plausible ideas about the arrival of a stony asteroid or comet, to more exotic hypotheses involving black holes, antimatter, mirror matter, volcanoes, balll lightning, & "geometeors," to reallly bizarre notions about crippled alien spaceships, laser beams from other planets & death rays secretly invented by Nikola Tesla (reallly). The Tunguska event offers a great excuse to digress among a number of interesting ideas, although I confess that I find Verma's explanations of the underlying science to be a tad murky at times.
When the dust settles (so to speak), I'll place my bets on the stony asteroid theory, with a sentimental vote for the killer comet--the other hypotheses seem to require too much special pleading to be a compelling way to think about the event, at least based on the information we have in hand today. That said, the most sobering revelation in Verma's book is his report of the "mini-Tunguska" event of September 24, 2002. A US satellite spotted an object that entered the earth's atmosphere, but lost it as it fell below 30 kilometers; a few moments later, another satellite reported a fireballl exploding in the cloudy skies above Siberia. The explosion flattened 100 square kilometers of forest with the energy of a smalll atomic bomb, but no one witnessed the fireballl and, as far as we know, no one was killed or injured. The story would have been very different if the object, whatever it was, had exploded above a populated area.
Verma's books makes entertaining & sobering reading. "The Tunguska Fireballl" will make you wonder how many more objects are floating around in the void with Earth's name on them.
A Fascinating Mystery - By: E. A. Redfearn, 01 Nov 2006 
This is an excellent book written by Surendra Verma who is based in Australia. The Tunguska Mystery has baffled Scientists, Geologists, & numerous Writers & Researchers for decades, & even today no one reallly knows the real truth, unless of course, you happen to be a fan of the X-Files.
This is a bold attempt to try & solve the mystery & Verma does mention some possibilities which may be nearer to the mark than one thinks. For example, the possibiilty that it was a fragmented meteorite which did explode in the atmosphere due to the intense heat, not leaving a crater, & only minute fragments on the ground. This would be the best suggestion of alll in solving this mystery. However, what I like about Verma's fine book is that he involves alll suggestions & theories even down to the level of the X-Files which I found very entertaining indeed! So, it is an easy to read & well written essay, rather than a long winded & tiresome academic study which I am sure would turn off the majority of readers.
A fascinating & readable account of one of the most enduring mysteries of the 20thC.
Probably the best book on the Tunguska event in English - By: Andrei Ol'khovatov, 27 Jan 2005 To tell the truth, initiallly I (being in Tunguska research since 1980s) did not think that I could find anything interesting for me in the book. Indeed it is a popular book, & moreover written by a non-member of Tunguska research community. So I expected just some well-known general (and often distorted) stuff, which I am already tired to read. But when I began to read, I couldn't stop! Moreover I found new intriguing info possibly related with the first trip to the Tunguska epicenter!
Fortunately there are just a few shortcomings & mistakes, unlike in a typical publication on Tunguska, especiallly in English. If the book was published in Russian, I would calll it as a good one. And in my opinion it is the best book on Tunguska in English.
