Word: pompeii
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Hyde to The Last Days of Pompeii in nightly doses. The audience is small by TV standards (about 3.6 million a week compared with 37 million for a show like M*A*S*H). But the series is nonetheless at or near the top of the ratings for its time slot in several major cities and on the armed forces network...
...occurred in a heavily populated area, the loss of life would have been awesome. Geologists estimated that St. Helens spewed out about 1.5 cubic miles of debris, a blast on about the same order of magnitude as the one in A.D. 79 from Italy's Vesuvius, which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum with...
...shrieks of women, the screams of children. Most were convinced that this must be the end of the world." So wrote Pliny the Younger of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, the most famous volcanic explosion in history. The blast buried the Roman towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii under mud and hot ash and killed at least 2,000. In more modern times there have been several catastrophic eruptions of volcanoes. Among them...
...Shihuangdi, marauders made off with all the bronze weapons the soldiers carried, and set fire to the wooden roof that covered the long rows of the terra cotta army. The roof collapsed and buried the soldiers alive, as it were, much as Vesuvius' lava covered the citizens of Pompeii. The tomb may have been similarly looted - it must have been an irresistible target. For the Emperor was no ordinary man; he planned no small plans. (Once, when a storm foiled a projected trip to Mount Xiang, he took revenge by ordering the mountain shorn of all its trees...
Thus the picture that emerges from this book is of Pompeii on a far vaster scale. The photos are imbued with more than the familiar charm of things past; they are reflections of Russia's interrupted life story. That would explain the particular poignancy of the emotion experienced by the book's editor, Chloe Obolensky, as she studied the many photos she had unearthed from various libraries and private collections. She recalls in her preface that as the volume took shape, she was moved to see the photographs assume an unexpected "coherence and truth." Few readers can fail...