The legendary annihilation in 1883 of the volcano-island of Krakatoa — the name has since become a by-word for a cataclysmic disaster — was followed by an immense tsunami that killed nearly 40,000 people. Beyond the purely physical horrors of

Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he...