Ghosts of Vesuvius: A New Look at the Last Days of Pompeii, How Towers Fall, and Other Strange Connections

Rating:
Summary: suspend your English Comp notion of how a book should be wri
Review: First of all let me say that I really learned a lot from this book. I had read some of the forensic information on the victims of Vesuvius in a journal article written in the 1980s and have often wondered what else had come of the work there. When I discovered Ghosts of Vesuvius by Charles Pellegrino, I felt I would at last learn a little more. I did indeed learn a great deal more but not all of it about Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Dr. Pellegrino is obviously a person of diverse interests and experience who has worked and corresponded professionally with researchers like Haraldur Sigurdsson (volcanology), Carl Sagan (cosmology), Issac Asimov (cosmology), Stephen Jay Gould (paleontology), Robert Ballard (marine science), Arthur C. Clarke (space engineer and astronomer), and Sara Bisel (forensic scientist). He also appears to be able to propound competently on both religion and philosophy and to speak knowledgeably about historical figures, events, politics, law and society. In short, he is an exceptionally well rounded individual. (E. O. Wilson would probably approve of his efforts towards consiliance).

The book is not probably for everyone, however, since it seems almost stream of consciousness in style. It took me a while to stand aside from the English Comp expectation that there be a beginning, middle and end with smooth transitions between concepts and a clear, up-front development of a central theme. I had the feeling that the author had a great deal to talk about and had decided to say it all in one book!

For those able to take information of various sorts and fit it into what they already know without necessarily needing a continuous thread, the author is a gold mine. Among other topics, he discusses the origin of the cosmos, the solar system, and the earth, the evolution of life, reveals our position in time by taking the reader backwards in leaps that double in length back to the big bang, discusses the mistakes and ambition of various Roman emperors and the development of Roman legal systems especially those regarding the rights of former slaves. He also discusses the effects of other volcanic events on the world, including that at Thera during the Minoan period and of Krakatoa during the 19th Century and analyzes the Old and New Testaments for indications of the psychological impacts of the AD 79 eruption on biblical stories. He outlines the various Gnostic sects of Christianity, their setting in the Roman world, and their beliefs vis a vis the Roman Catholic Church. He describes the historical background of the Vesuvian eruptions, points out the characteristics of what has become labeled a Plinian type of eruption, and describes some of the forensic data that provide insight into the human drama of the event. He narrates details of the 9/11 attack including the physics of the collapse of the buildings and of the odd pattern of survival of various individuals.

An excellent discourse, but suspend your English Comp notion of how a book should be written.

Rating:
Summary: Vesuvius in New York, or, How CRP Dealt with September 11
Review: I originally began reading this book out of a desire to find a thorough account of the exact events of the famous Vesuvius eruption in August 79 CE. I quickly realized that I had got more than I bargained for: along with a minute-by-minute report of those fatal 24 hours on the Bay of Naples, Charles Pellegrino provides a book that is equally a primer on the geological prehistory of the Earth and life on it; a melancholy meditation on some of history's most poignant what-ifs; a spiritual review of and an agnostic's indictment of the early (ugly) history of the Roman Catholic Church; a summary of the beliefs of Egyptian Gnosticism; and an impressionistic, rigorous account of the events of September 11 in New York City from the viewpoint of a volcanolgist-cum-paleontologist-cum-astrobiologist-cum-physicist-cum-ad infinitum. Along the way it becomes clear that Pellegrino has led one of the most interesting lives in recent memory; he name-drops a who's-who of the scientific community from Stephen Jay Gould to Stephen Hawking, and calmly recounts, in footnotes, such spectacular incidents as the time when he was nearly blown up with the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Does this sound exhausting? It is, but more importantly, it is fascinating. "Ghosts of Vesuvius" is one of the most engrossing books I have read in a long time. Though the narrative follows an associative rather than linear logic, Pellegrino manages, for the most part, to keep the connections he wishes to illuminate clear in his reader's mind. Herculaneum, Pompeii, and New York City are in the end far more alike than they are different, and Pellegrino's largest point comes through perfectly, though he never says it in so many words: our civilization may be ending. And it's our own damn fault.

Still, "Ghosts of Vesuvius" has flaws, some of them worth mentioning. At a stylistic level, Pellegrino loves ellipsis...far too much... He never learned, or doesn't care, that three dots is not an acceptable end to a sentence, let alone to a sentence fragment, and the ellipses become wearying. (As do his endless paragraphic, paranthetical remarks.) Furthermore, Pellegrino makes a few factual errors: the books of Lucretius were not burned by the Roman Church; they were in fact copied and recopied by monks. The upheaval in the Byzantine Empire of 537 CE (which Pellegrino contends was caused by a volcanic eruption in the Pacific) did not lead to that empire's 'downfall,' as that polity continued to exist, albeit never so gloriously, for another nine hundred years. Similarly, Pellegrino makes much of the fact that Marcus Tullius Cicero 'disappeared' in 43 BCE, when any competent classicist (or student of third-semester Latin) can tell you that Cicero was murdered by Mark Antony's goons on the Appian Way, and his head and hands were displayed on the Rostrum in the Forum as a warning to others who opposed Antony.

Yet these are minor quibbles. In the end, although Pellegrino's book provides a treasure trove on information on many more topics than the 79 CE Vesuvius eruption, it is far more an account of Pellegrino wrestling with the fact of September 11 than it is a work of nonfiction. Much as Bruce Springsteen did with "The Rising," and Art Spiegelman did with "In the Shadow of No Towers," Pellegrino stares into the abyss of humanity's nadir, and emerges with a flawed but brilliant masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: Surge clouds and shock cocoons
Review: I've read a number of Pellegrino's books and so I was excited to see that a new one was available. Pellegrino is an author who can combine history, paleontology, archaeology, geology, volcanology, religion and philosophy into a single coherent narrative. I am constantly impressed by his ability to communicate a broad range of seemingly unrelated facts.

The book centers on excavations that have been going on for centuries in Pompeii and Herculaneum. While anyone with a basic grasp of Roman history knows about Vesuvius' eruption, more and more about these sites is being understood each year. Pellegrino focuses on the picture that is coming into to focus about how *modern* Roman life looked two millenia ago. He also shares stunning new discoveries about how the Romans perished in the horrors of AD 79.

There's other material here, though, and it makes for a compelling read. I didn't expect much new in Chapter Three, which is a timeline of the planet's history (something he's written about before), but Pellegrino offers a fascinating narrative about how horrific disasters have shaped our world.

I'm afraid that his discussion of Gnosticism in the early Christian church seemed a tad directionless. As a self-professed agnostic, he really doesn't seem clear on what he wants to *do* with this material.

The book closes with a powerful discussion of his work analyzing the aftermath of 9-11 at Ground Zero. While he tells us that the collapse of the WTC towers was only a minute fraction of the devastation of the Vesuvius eruption, the horrors parallel each other in disquieting ways.

This isn't a comfortable book to read, but it's deeply fascinating.

Rating:
Summary: Pulling together the seperate threads of history
Review: Something about the title of this book caught my eye, and I have barely put it down since. What could Pompeii, the wreck of the Titanic, early Christianity, and the fall of the towers of the World Trade Center possibly have in common? The dynamics of disaster, the currents and eddys in destructive forces, and how little human nature has changed in two thousand years are all tied together with the eye of a scientist in this book. It rambles at times, and it suffers from poor illustrations that detract from the point they are trying to make, and those things make me rate it less than a perfect 5. But there is compelling information in reading first person observations of the destruction of 79 AD and 2001 AD. The profound influence of Pompeii's destruction on the foundation of Christianity makes you wonder how the events of 9/11/2001 will ripple into the future. And how much they have already changed us, as Vesuvius changed the Roman Empire. This is certainly a book that will make you think, and it's not for the squeamish. The multi-layered narrative gets a bit tough to connect at times. But reading about how the WTC changed the way archeologists view "hallowed ground" make it worth the effort. There are images in this book that will haunt you - red roses, two dolls, a law library on a fire escape, bodies in a seaside shack, the story of a slave girl, Company 40 and Ten House. Those are worth buying the book alone.


Rating:
Summary: newspaper reviews
Review: The Boston Herald
Sunday, September 12, 2004

CATASTROPHIC CONNECTIONS, by Rosemary Herbert

CHARLES PELLEGRINO has scrutinized the ruins of ancient Pompeii. He has also studied the physics of the forces at play when the Twin Towers collapsed on September 11, 2001. Now, in a volume loaded with scientific fact and often poetic prose, he ruminates on what he calls "strange connections" between catastrophic events in times ancient and contemporary. The result is an out-of-the-ordinary volume about some utterly extraordinary events.

There is no way to read this book except with a sense of wonder. And this is only enhanced by the author's talent for using contemporary objects to help readers picture incredible forces and events. In describing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, Pellegrino writes, "Initially, magma is jetted out of Vesuvius at the rate of 1,000 tons per second (the approximate mass of 1,000 automobiles per second)."

Next, he likens to the frothy cream in cappuccino, the layers of lighter and heavier elements in the volcano's magma. When the expelled material is laid on the earth's surface, he explains, "Like a Vesuvian upside-down cake, the strata (or succession of layers) occurring within the earth are found inverted upon the earth."

Many of the details as revealed and understood by modern forensic anthropologists are horrific. Pompeii's sister city, Herculaneum, basked in sunshine throughout the early part of the volcano's eruption. But then it was struck by "surge clouds" from the blast.

Many doomed citizens sought shelter under the marina on the Bay of Naples. Then, the "first surge cloud... shattered their teeth," Pellegrino writes, "and, before their nerves could respond, vaporized the people to the bone - all three hundred of them, all within two-tenths of a second."

Some of those who had more time to realize they were in harm's way behaved surprisingly. Pellegrino reports that Pliny the Younger resisted running from the disaster in order to go on reading a book. He was exhibiting an urge to "nest" that sometimes happens in response to obviously impending danger.

It may seem a leap to bring in the collapse of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers here, until Pellegrino tells us some of the same volcanologists who had studied Pompeii "were drawn to the crater in Manhattan, where they became forensic [archaeologists]." They even laid to rest one of the great controversies that shadowed the aftermath of the September 11 rescue efforts - the alleged looting of a clothing store by some firefighters.

Pellegrino explains, strange clusters of order sometimes occur within chaos. Thus, new clothing was found "still folded and tagged and sometimes still stacked," in the vicinity of Ground Zero - but not in the cab of the fire truck in question.

"To a few, it did not seem possible that order could occur in the midst of total chaos, without the meddling of human hands," Pellegrino writes. "Puzzlement led, inevitably, to embellishment. And embellishment led, months later, to a firsthand eyewitness participant's account - at once strange and cruel - professing that the cab of 4 Truck, when it was opened by excavators, was 'filled with dozens' of those 'tagged, folded, and stacked' jeans." He says the excavation of the truck was filmed from start to finish, revealing no such load of jeans.

Rosemary Herbert is the Boston Herald's book review editor.


Pellegrino's fascinating book, Ghosts of Vesuvius - is full of insights into science and history. No insight is more important than the one that connects the father and son in Pompeii to Harry Ramos [in the World Trade Center]. Archaeologists unearth bones and uncover civilizations, but "the bones speak still of our common humanity," Pellegrino writes, "speak still, from their last second of life, of love and mutual tenderness."
- The Sunday Oregonian

Imagine natural history as written by Walt Whitman.
- Sunday edition, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

VARIETY March 2004

CAMERON DISASTER PIC ERUPTS

Helmer, Fox Explode Over Vesuvius Book: If it's not one disaster for director James Cameron, it's another. After sinking the Titanic for movie-going audiences around the world, the Oscar-winning Helmer and his Lightstorm Entertainment have now snatched up the rights to Charles Pellegrino's upcoming book, Ghosts of Vesuvius, which gives a forensic archaeological account of the devastation wreaked by Vesuvius nearly 2000 years ago. Newly excavated artifacts from the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, combined with new forensic techniques, will now help Cameron and his team to verify the facts of the cities during their destruction.
By Michael Fleming

James Cameron is getting back into the epic-sized disaster game: 20th Century Fox and Cameron's Fox-based Lightstorm Entertainment have optioned screen rights to Ghosts of Vesuvius, an upcoming Harper-Collins book by Charles Pellegrino about the volcanic eruption that leveled Pompeii in 79 AD.

Cameron will produce Vesuvius with his Lightstorm cohorts Jon Landau and Rae Sanchini. Helmer will wait before deciding whether he will direct the fictional look at Pompeii and its destruction that will be culled from Pellegrino's non-fiction book.

Pellegrino is a scientist-author who became acquainted with Cameron through two books he wrote about the Titanic; Helmer wrote the introduction to one of them, Ghosts of the Titanic - which also became a [basis for] a Cameron film.

The stories of the iceberg collision that doomed the Titanic in 1912 and the volcano eruption that killed so many in antiquity share an air of archaeological and scientific intrigue.

The volcano was estimated to have unleashed a blast [1,000] times more powerful than the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima.

Just as Cameron was able to verify how the Titanic broke apart by taking deep-sea trips to film the damaged hull, there are equally compelling relics that bear witness to the ancient volcanic tragedy, such as facial molds made from corpses found encased in ash cocoons.

The Lightstorm trio will sift through the book to create a fictionalized account, which likely will tie into the politics of Rome, an empire whose demise may have been hastened by the devastation of Vesuvius.

Cameron has long said he will make his next feature using the 3-D technology he employed in Ghosts of the Abyss, but has not yet said what that film will be. The pic is expected to shoot later this year or early next year, and will be his first dramatic feature since Titanic.

August 2004

POPULAR SCIENCE BOOK OF THE MONTH

CATYCLISMS CONNECTED: Sometimes it takes an outsider to bring new perspectives to a field of study. Charles Pellegrino has made a career of this, skipping with omnivorous intensity between volcanology, archaeology, astrobiology and paleontology. In his new book, Ghosts of Vesuvius (William Morrow, $26), Pellegrino throws them all in and then some, tracing the physics of destruction at Pompeii back to the origins of the universe and forward to the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which buried some 20,000 Romans under several stories of ash and rocks in AD 79, is the focus of the book, but the author hardly confines himself to a single topic. In jumping from volcanic eruptions to stellar explosions, he comes across as a sort of bushwacking polymath, combining his mastery of scientific detail with a vivid imagination - even if certain questions might be better left to another book. (Do we really need to dwell on the Gnostic gospels?)

The most fascinating details are the connections between cataclysmic events. For example, much of the physics involved in the Vesuvius event also directed the collapse of the World Trade Center. The forces at work were remarkably similar, including roiling clouds of debris traveling at up to [120] miles an hour and pressures of 3 to 9 tons per square inch - equivalent to the force of a speeding.38-caliber bullet [per square inch]. And Pellegrino deftly explains how the collective force of tons of rocks or dust-laden air can crush one structure yet leave its neighbor eerily untouched. The ghosts in the title emerge heartrendingly in the books closing pages, in which survival accounts of the carnage on September 11th provide a human view of the incredible violence of massive disasters


Rating:
Summary: Amazing fireworks and a few damp squibs
Review: The tragedy of an evolving planet is that earthquakes and volcanic eruptions along plate boundaries can devastate human populations, either by fire or flood. I began this book shortly after the tsunami washed over shorelines across much of South Asia, and ghosts from that shifting plate boundary haunted my reading, as well as the ghosts that Pellegrino conjures up from Pompeii and Herculaneum.

In the book "Rare Earth" (Copernicus, 2000), Dr. Peter D. Ward and Dr. Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington argued the slow recycling of planetary crust was essential for the evolution of complex life. Dr. Charles Pellegrino makes the same proposition, even as he deals with the horrors caused by plate tectonics, most especially the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79.

"Ghosts of Vesuvius" is about large-scale human tragedies, including the eruption of Thera and its annihilation of Minoan civilization, the eruption of Vesuvius and the burial of Pompeii and Herculaneum, the sinking of the Titanic, and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on 09/11/2001.

If you're wondering what all of the above disasters have in common, the author (from his studies of the Titanic, Thera, and Vesuvius) has become "one of the world's only experts on downblast and surge physics." He was invited to Ground Zero to examine the effects of the towers' collapse, and he weaves his 21st century ghosts and physics into the grim warp of previous human obliterations. It is a riveting story.

When he is not dealing with the big picture of cosmic beginnings, the origins of life, and plate tectonics, the author tells tales of human lives, brought back into existence through forensic archeology. The fate of the veteran Roman soldier who died while trying to organize a seaward evacuation of Herculaneum, the heroic last moments of Chief Officer Murdoch aboard the sinking Titanic, and the stories of the firemen who continued up the stairwell in the North Tower even though they knew its collapse was imminent, are all well told---stories of ordinary people caught in the maw of extraordinary events.

There are a few damp squibs in this book of amazing fireworks:

* Benjamin Franklin visited the court of Louis XVI not Louis XIV

* The fate of the Universe seems more likely to be a 'Big Chill' not a 'Big Crunch' as expounded in this book. Even if there were a 'Big Crunch' I don't quite understand why Pellegrino believes the resulting 'Big Bang' would create exactly the same universe that we currently inhabit.

* Even if Thera hadn't exploded and the Minoan civilization had continued to develop, I don't believe they were close to inventing space travel--not without calculus, much less without zero and the rest of the 'Arabic' numerals.

Nevertheless, "Ghosts of Vesuvius" is a provocative, astonishing combination of many scientific disciplines, apocalyptic theology, great heroics, and ordinary lives cut brutally short. Highly recommended.