Book Review: Ghosts of Vesuvius

Ghosts of Vesuvius by Charles Pellegrino *****

People who like their reading clear, concise and organized will probably hate this book. To someone like me, who is decidedly “right-brained,” it was a joy to read, even though there were times when I put it aside because I just couldn’t cope with the sheer amount of information.

Charles Pellegrino, who has also explored the wreck of the Titanic and the island of Thera (whose devastation in a volcanic eruption is a possible inspiration for the story of Atlantis), here brings his expertise to the results of the first-century eruption of Mt. Vesuvius as well as the collapse of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. “The behavior of dust-heavy air in Manhattan was governed by the very same physics that sent volcanic death clouds crashing...upon the cities of Vesuvius in A.D. 79,” he writes, and the book which would have resulted from this simple comparison would probably have been equally fascinating, although much shorter and more focused.

Instead, Pellegrino gives us an extended meditation on catastrophes, human reactions to them and the impermanence of civilizations that is truly breathtaking in its scope, yet also shines a spotlight on intimate human moments and the personal reactions of the author, all the more poignant in the case of 9/11, where he lost people he knew. The bulk of the book is devoted to recent discoveries at Vesuvius, however. Pellegrino’s reconstruction of the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, based on what science knows about the physics of it, eyewitness accounts from authors such as Pliny the Younger, and archaeological evidence, is riveting. He also builds up a context in which to place them, a context of slave revolts, religious ferment and amazingly advanced technology, which help to bring the people whose stories he tells to life.

This book probably could have been more tightly edited without losing its stream-of-consciousness feel, and Pellegrino’s assertions were sometimes hyperbolic and occasionally flat-out wrong (the Pharisees were not a “sect of Temple high priests,” but in general non-priests who were often in opposition to the Temple cult), but I still found it enjoyable and well-worth reading.