Read this!

I've just finished a remarkable book by a remarkable author: Ghosts of Vesuvius, by Charles Pellegrino. It's subtitled "a new look at the last days of Pompeii, how towers fall, and other strange connections", and it's one of those books I don't think I will ever forget.
Charles Pellegrino is the man who gave rise to Indiana Jones: in the course of his archaelogical expeditions, he's been shot, stabbed, and had a grenade pitched at him. He's even had a 727 crash literally on top of him while he was driving a pickup truck. One hundred twenty people died in that little incident, and by some miracle of physics known as a "shock cocoon" Pellegrino was not among them--in fact, his truck was able to move under its own power.
But that doesn't take the measure of the man: not even close. Besides excelling in archaeology--both land and marine--he's an accomplished astronomer and astrophysicist, an agnostic Biblical scholar, and not least of all a writer of rare talent and phenomenal intellect who is able to wind the strands of his knowledge and experience into an absorbing and provoking read. More than once. His horror novel, Dust, is one of the more frightening things I've ever read, and his works on Sodom and Gomorrah, Atlantis, and the Titanic are required reading for anyone even remotely interested.
Now he's out with a book that ties many of his previous works together. It's a ball of yarn of a tome that rambles from moments after the Big Bang to September 11th, 2001 then back to August 24-25, A.D. 79, then back another twelve hundred years to the Thera eruption that wiped out what came to be known as Atlantis...back and forth through time...
It's essentially a book about explosions. Pellegrino has analyzed the forces unleashed in many historical explosions and classified them for easy reference. One World Trade Center is roughly one tenth of a Hiroshima. One Hiroshima is roughly one THOUSANDth of a Pompeii. One Pompeii equals, roughly, one THOUSANDth of a Thera. Think on that a second: the largest force we puny humans have been able to exert equals barely one millionth of what Nature unleashed on Crete in 1234 B.C--or at Tambora in 1815.
Pellegrino takes us into the lives of Pompeiians and Herculaneans circa 79 A.D. We learn of their diets, their occupations, their legal practices and their religious beliefs, all from painstaking archaelogical excavation and analysis of flash-frozen and meticulously preserved documents. He then takes us on a harrowing, minute-by-minute account of the Vesuvian eruption that buried the cities in stories of ash and pumice. This is riveting reading, dispassionate and yet highly emotional. You are placed in a boathouse in Herculaneum where upwards of three hundred people died in less than two-tenths of a second. You find yourself out past the gates of Pompeii, trudging through choking dust clouds and pelted by stones...and then buried in a mass of liquid rock moving so fast you don't have time to see it coming.
Somehow, what made the destruction all the more real and unnerving to me was learning just how incredibly advanced the Pompeiian civilization was. I had no idea. Consider: the houses looked a lot like ours. They had hot and cold running water, flush toilets, and sewer systems; printing presses; steam engines; transatlantic voyages. (Roman vessels have been discovered off Brazil and Venezuela.) They were on the cusp of discovering flight (toy gliders have been found in the Vesuvian ruins). Although they did have slavery, a slave at that time in the Roman Empire had better prospects than most free men at any time up until the nineteenth century. He (or she!) could buy freedom and become a wealthy entrepreneur, and many were treated like family.
In short, Pompeii was a truly civilized society--which makes it all the more difficult, somehow, to watch it go up in smoke and dust. And the knowledge that many of the Roman inventions were seen centuries before at Thera (where they actually had discovered batteries!) further depresses me, somehow. It's like we're on a treadmill to nowhere.
Such depressing, disturbing thoughts cannot be helped as Pellegrino fast forwards to New York City on September 11th and proceeds to give a second-by-second account of Pompeii in miniature. The downblasts, surge clouds and shock coccoons are all present in this man-made conflagration. So, again, are the people, the lucky who lived and the lucky who died.

A stunning read, highly recommended...oh, yes, and James Cameron has snapped up the rights.