Sign-In
Cart
Could the Population of Pompeii Be Saved?
Paperback
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
ISBN13: 9798193096993
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 300
Weight: 0.89
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 300
Weight: 0.89
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Everyone knows what happened at Pompeii. A mountain exploded, a city was buried, and its people were caught mid-gesture and preserved forever in the ash. It is one of the few facts about the ancient world that almost nobody bothers to doubt.
It is also, in its most important particular, wrong. The city held something on the order of eleven thousand people. The excavated dead number roughly eleven hundred. The overwhelming majority of Pompeians walked out of Pompeii, resettled along the coast within a day's travel of the ruin, married, prospered, paid for public buildings, and were absorbed so completely into the towns that took them in that historians needed two thousand years and a database of family names to find them again.
It is also, in its most important particular, wrong. The city held something on the order of eleven thousand people. The excavated dead number roughly eleven hundred. The overwhelming majority of Pompeians walked out of Pompeii, resettled along the coast within a day's travel of the ruin, married, prospered, paid for public buildings, and were absorbed so completely into the towns that took them in that historians needed two thousand years and a database of family names to find them again.
Which turns the famous question inside out. The mystery is not why they died. It is why anyone was standing there in the first place - on a mountain that had done exactly this before, to a Bronze Age population that also fled, also mostly survived, and was also forgotten. And why, today, seven hundred thousand people live inside an evacuation zone drawn around an assumption, on the slopes of a volcano that has been sealed shut and accumulating pressure since 1944.
This book follows three threads through the same catastrophe: the physics of why the mountain kills the way it does, the recovered hours of individual people whose last decisions we can now reconstruct almost minute by minute, and the uncomfortable discovery that societies are magnificent at helping the survivors of a disaster and nearly incapable of preventing one. Along the way it introduces the geologists, classicists, geneticists, and civil-protection officials who have spent their careers arguing about all of it, occasionally changing their minds in public, and once announcing that the history books would have to be rewritten only to quietly un-rewrite them four years later.
The past does not repeat itself here. It simply waits, at a tempo longer than any institution can hold in mind.
Keywords: Pompeii, Vesuvius, volcanology, archaeology, disaster preparedness, risk, ancient Rome
This book follows three threads through the same catastrophe: the physics of why the mountain kills the way it does, the recovered hours of individual people whose last decisions we can now reconstruct almost minute by minute, and the uncomfortable discovery that societies are magnificent at helping the survivors of a disaster and nearly incapable of preventing one. Along the way it introduces the geologists, classicists, geneticists, and civil-protection officials who have spent their careers arguing about all of it, occasionally changing their minds in public, and once announcing that the history books would have to be rewritten only to quietly un-rewrite them four years later.
The past does not repeat itself here. It simply waits, at a tempo longer than any institution can hold in mind.
Keywords: Pompeii, Vesuvius, volcanology, archaeology, disaster preparedness, risk, ancient Rome
Also from
Kriger, Peter
Pourquoi La Révolution Industrielle n'A-T-Elle Pas EU Lieu Dans l'Antiquité ?
Kriger, Peter
Paperback
$32.78
Roma Non È Caduta, Ha Solo Cambiato Server: Perché Non Riusciamo a Smettere Di Pensare All'impero Romano
Kriger, Peter
Paperback
$30.25
A Theory of the Cinematic Masterpiece in the Generative Era: Temporal Sovereignty, the Carriers of Density, and Why Technical Progress Makes Art Deare
Kriger, Peter
Halushko, Denys
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$13.20
Rome Didn't Fall - It Just Changed Servers: Why We Can't Stop Thinking about the Roman Empire
Kriger, Peter
Paperback
$28.80
Rome Is Niet Gevallen, Het Heeft Alleen de Servers Veranderd: Waarom We Maar Blijven Denken Aan Het Romeinse Rijk
Kriger, Peter
Paperback
$27.50
Peter Kriger Roma No Cayó, Solo Cambió de Servidor: Por Qué No Podemos Dejar de Pensar En El Imperio Romano
Kriger, Peter
Paperback
$27.85
The Empire Built on Rubber: How a Bicycle Craze Helped Create the Caoutchouc Catastrophe
Kriger, Peter
Paperback
$21.60
The Barbarian Startup: How Germanic Tribes Bought, Borrowed, and Stole an Empire
Kriger, Peter
Paperback
$21.60
Hannibal at the Gates: What If Carthage Had Won and Rome Became a Historical Footnote?
Kriger, Peter
Paperback
$21.60
The Medieval Internet: How Monasteries Stored and Transmitted Europe's Memory
Kriger, Peter
Paperback
$20.40
Also in
General World History
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
Kendi, Ibram X.
Paperback
$10.99
Titanic: The Ship Magnificent - Volume Two: Interior Design and Fitting Out
Braunschweiger, Art
Hall, Steve
Beveridge, Bruce
Hardcover
$84.50
Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902 1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna
Hacohen, Malachi Haim
Hardcover
$236.28
Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s
Howe, Sean
Hardcover
From $12.99
A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890-1960
Van Slyck, Abigail A.
Hardcover
$12.99
Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal: A Food Science Nutrition History Book
Bittman, Mark
Hardcover
$10.99
The Rise of Thomas Cromwell: Power and Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII, 1485-1534
Everett, Michael
Paperback
$10.99
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
Purnell, Sonia
Hardcover
$10.99
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
Loewen, James W.
Paperback
$9.99
The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II
Groom, Winston
Paperback
From $9.99
Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World
McNeill, J. R.
Paperback
$10.99
Seafaring Women: Adventures of Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways, and Sailors' Wives
Cordingly, David
Paperback
$17.10
Dangerous Games: Faces, Incidents, and Casualties of the Cold War
Wise, James E.
Baron, Scott
Hardcover
$8.99
Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
Green, John
Hardcover
From $17.99
The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail
Dolin, Eric Jay
Hardcover
$25.19
1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World
Ahamed, Liaquat
Hardcover
$28.80
Obstinate Daughters: The Rebels, Writers, and Renegade Women Who Ignited the American Revolution
Kiernan, Denise
Hardcover
$28.80
The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy
Ross, Steven J.
Hardcover
$29.69
100 Bible Verses That Made America: Defining Moments That Shaped Our Enduring Foundation of Faith
Morgan, Robert J.
Paperback
$21.84
The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World
Mazzeo, Tilar J.
Hardcover
$27.00
True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color--From Azure to Zinc Pink
Stamper, Kory
Hardcover
$28.80
The Housewives Underground: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the JFK Assassination Our Most Enduring Mystery
Tiffany, Kaitlyn
Hardcover
$31.50
1,000 Days in America: An Illustrated History of the Moments That Defined a Nation
National Geographic
Hardcover
$47.50
Two Ships: Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620, and the Struggle for the Soul of America
Reynolds, David S.
Hardcover
$31.50
How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words
Galer, Sophia Smith
Hardcover
$28.80
The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery
Kara, Siddharth
Hardcover
$27.00
Lightning Beneath the Sea: The Race to Wire the World and the Dawn of the Information Age
Tabor, James M.
Hardcover
$28.79
American Pope: Leo XIV's Road from the South Side of Chicago to Vatican City
Burke, Daniel
Detrow, Scott
Hardcover
$31.34
The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook
Sides, Hampton
Paperback
$17.10
The Conjuring of America: Mojos, Mermaids, Medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women's Magic
Stewart, Lindsey
Hardcover
$33.25
Liberation Summer: The Moment That Changed the Women's Movement and the Future of American Politics
McElya, Micki
Hardcover
$30.40
A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders: Surprising Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps
Elledge, Jonn
Paperback
$17.06
The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions That Shook the World
Pancevski, Bojan
Hardcover
$26.99
Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, an Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History
Cohen, Adam
Hardcover
$28.80
No One's Coming: The Rogue Heroes Our Government Turns to When There's Nowhere Else to Turn
Hazzard, Kevin
Hardcover
$28.50
Socialism: The Real History from Plato to the Present: How the Deep State Capitalizes on Crises to Consolidate Control [With Paperback Book]
Federer, William J.
Paperback
$19.00
How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy's Guide to Silencing Women
Venditozzi, Zoe
Mitchell, Claire
Paperback
$17.09
The Summer of Death: The Great Heat Wave of 1936 and the Making of Modern-Day America
Williams, Geoff
Hardcover
$33.25
Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America
Loeffler, James
Hardcover
$26.99
Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City
Brown, Kate
Hardcover
$28.79
The Phantom: The Untold Story of the American Marine the Nazis Could Not Kill
Drury, Bob
Clavin, Tom
Hardcover
$31.35
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
Purnell, Sonia
Paperback
From $11.99
A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
Egan, Timothy
Paperback
$16.20
The Women's History of the Modern World: How Radicals, Rebels, and Everywomen Revolutionized the Last 200 Years
Miles, Rosalind
Paperback
$18.99
The Long Run: Steve Prefontaine, Frank Shorter, Joan Benoit, Grete Waitz, and the Decade That Made the Marathon Cool
Dugard, Martin
Hardcover
$28.80
The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within Us Slave Culture
Woodard, Vincent
Paperback
$56.55
King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
Anderson, Scott
Hardcover
$33.25
How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession
Blackwell Baines, Caitlin
Hardcover
$28.45
Radical Duke: How One Aristocrat-And the American Revolution-Transformed Britain
Allen, Danielle
Hardcover
$33.75
Freedom's Daughters: How a Generation of Black Women Resisted Oppression Through Literacy and Education
Headlee, Celeste
Hardcover
$29.44