Pompeii

Rating:
Summary: Beach read.... and it is fun!
Review: This is fun, fast read. a good story, very visual, and shall I dare say "beach" read. (Although I read it on the airplane.) Fun and it is a page-turner. I picked it up because later this year we plan to visit Pompeii and I thought it would be a fun way to get introduced to the site. This is not much of an historical novel, but interesting the way Harris weaves the story around the various Roman cities.
I liked it a lot better than Night Fall the last "thriller" I read.


Rating:
Summary: Not as thrilling as some of the author's other works
Review: "Pompeii" ends with a bang: the Vesuvius eruption of 79AD, which buries the town and wipes out most of the characters. A good guy -- a waterwords engineer -- and a bad guy -- a real estate developer -- struggle, but the reader can't help thinking that what they do doesn't matter because they will all be dead in two days anyway. While I enjoyed "Pompeii" as holiday reading, I found it less of a page turner than other books by Robert Harris, such as "Fatherland" and "Enigma." Both were about people confronting the human-made disaster of nazism with their wits, and with the ability to affect the outcome by their actions.
"Pompeii" also dwells too much for my taste on the dark side of Roman society. Yes, they had slavery and masters who abused slaves, but so did every other contemporary society, and so did the US until the Civil War. Of the many characters we meet, only a handful have any integrity. All the others are hustlers or corrupt officials. If 1st -century Rome truly had been this rotten, it is hard to imagine how it could have achieved what we still marvel at 2000 years later.
The "Disappointed" reader who reviewed the book on 12/1/2003 is mistaken to assume that the hero's rejection of religious beliefs is anachronistic. Writing "De Natura Deorum" more than 100 years before, Cicero states that there are philosophers who don't believe the pagan gods exist. He himself makes no strong statement of faith, but, like Thomas Jefferson with respect to Christianity, he believes that the disappearance of piety towards the gods will entail the disappearance of loyalty and social union. In other words, whether the gods exist or not, it's good for the people to worship them.

Rating:
Summary: An interesting but not spectacular historical fiction
Review: Just like the movie, Titanic, this book does not have a surprise ending. Since the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and Pompeii's fate are so well-documented and cited in our culture, the audience already has an expectation about the plot and is more likely to be critical. As a former archaeologist and an Earth Science teacher, I couldn't help but look for inconsistencies. As other reviewers have pointed out, Harris does come up short in some ways. However, I really appreciate his approach to the story.
The book reads like a mystery, where an aquarius is trying to determine why the aqueduct (the water lifeline) has gone dry. As he investigates, he encounters many symptoms of impending volcanic eruption, but has no way of knowing this. He is suspicious and compelled to understand the phenomena, like his acquaintence, Pliny (Yes, Harris does make a character of the epitomal historian). All the time, Harris reminds us of the science that relates to these phenomena by opening the chapters with excerpts of volcanology resources.

I would recommend this book as a read for a summer vacation at the beach or a cold weekend in blankets. It is a quick read and is very entertaining and compelling, but does not require reflection or mental exercise.