Krakatoa - Simon Winchester

I have been wanting to read this book for quite some time, but never had the chance.  I finally got it and started several weeks ago, when it became clear that another book I've reading, Catastrophe, is literally the first verse of this story (an explosion of a prior Krakatoa in 530 A.D. which disrupted essentially the entire planet).  I've known the story well, having read a lot about the eruption in some old encyclopedias when I was nine or so, then knowing well William Pene DuBois's brilliant children's book The Twenty-One Balloons.  But this book, I thought, would bring everything together.
Well, it did, sort of.  It began with that descriptive mishmash of history and science that I really like (when Bill Bryson is writing it) but Winchester turns phrases so many directions that you get a little disoriented.  His story careens through a variety of fields, including European history, geology, and vulcanism (well, obviously).  It's almost as though he's writing in the dark.  He eventually settles into a lengthy story about Dutch colonial rule, and manages to almost conceal the actual eruption in a cloud of minutiae.  The illustrations aren't much help - some maps spectacularly fail to even note where Krakatoa is, and the pictures don't help tell such a grand story.  Fortunately as I was reading this a recent National Geographic documentary on the eruption came on and the dramatization explained many things that the book did not (although it did pretty much skip the tsunami's effects).
The story also zooms alarmingly, from a easy-to-follow narrative about something into personal narratives about chipping rocks in Greenland, and running into six foot monitor lizards on the island today.  It's not that I mind those things - it's just that they underlined the flow of the narrative tremendously.  Right when I thought I understand what he was trying to tell me he zips off to another fact on a totally different level of detail, and loses me for a few pages.  And another thing.  Winchester is the master of asides - he can't help himself from noting every time he thinks a name of something sounds neat, or adding some unrelated piece of trivia.  I can't say that I really mind - it certainly gives the writing flavor, and I enjoy his style (it's similar to what I think I do that probably irritates people, but which makes writing enjoyable for me).  It's just that it seems, well, clumsy.  It's like it hasn't been edited down to tell a cohesive story where everything builds on each other.  Amazingly, the eruption itself and the destruction it caused didn't make a climax book.  It was just another few days in the life of a Dutch colony if you weren't reading the verbs closely.
Anyway, this is the first Winchester book I've been able to find at a used bookstore.  There are several others I'm looking forward to trying.  I'm curious whether my reaction will be similar to them.