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IN this compelling book, Charles Pellegrino manages to link the volcanic destruction of Pompeii by Vesuvius in AD 79 and the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center’s twin towers in a remarkably readable way.

Ghosts of Vesuvius combines Pliny the Younger’s account, put together from eyewitness reports of Pompeii’s demise, with our modern scientific reading of the event via experts, such as geologist Haraldur Sigurdsson, who bring the event and its people alive again.

And then Pellegrino takes a bold step. He draws a sympathetic comparison between that knowledge and experience, and personal accounts and technical investigations of the attack on the World Trade Center – an event with its own heroes, heroines and victims – to create a vivid, almost apocalyptic comparison. Ghosts of Vesuvius is compulsive reading.