Aliena, Jake, Orientis oppidum…
Well, my Latin’s a little rusty, but I tried. Anyway, I was up last night reading Pompeii, another one of my Christmas presents. Robert Harris has come up with a great historical potboiler. The parallels between Ampliatus, the main “villain” of the novel, and modern-day figures like Donald Trump or Michael Milken are a bit heavyhanded (“Lucrum gaudium!” or “Profit is joy!” is a particularly amusing version of “Greed is good!”), but it’s all great fun, and the level of detail on ancient Roman aqueduct engineering seems quite rich indeed. So rich that the care Harris put into getting the volcanological details right might not be obvious at first glance…
For those who are interested in making the comparison, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii is available through Project Gutenberg.
2 January 2004 | read this |
Read This: Tour of Duty
Douglas Brinkley’s Tour of Duty (recently excerpted in The Atlantic Monthly) offers tremendous insight into the character of John Kerry, frankly more than you’ll find in his official campaign book, A Call to Service. (And I reviewed them both for PW, so I should know!) (Though in all fairness, Kerry’s book isn’t at all bad for the genre, and he came off more candidly than Howard Dean did in his book.)
There don’t seem to be any reviews of the book online yet, or interviews with Brinkley, though they’re sure to come in the next week or so. In the meantime, here’s a link to the Eisenhower Center for American Studies, which Brinkley directs. If an interview shows up, I’ll revise the post or add a comment or something, but I wanted to give folks a heads up on the book, which has a one-day laydown next week…
1 January 2004 | read this |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
