Bodies from the Ash

Book: Bodies from the Ash: Life and Death in Ancient Pompeii
Author: James M. Deem
Audience: Grades 4-6
In a Nutshell: bodies from thin air do tell tales

In this book about the AD 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the focus is on the bodies. Which is interesting, because technically, there are no bodies. After a basic summary of the day of the eruption, Deem outlines a few excavations of buried Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum over the years; some were undertaken for noble archaeological reasons, others simply to grab stuff. The focus, however, is on those who died. The speed and intensity of the pyroclastic flow (one of my favorite terms- look it up) instantly killed and buried thousands of people, leaving empty, body-shaped pockets (Antibodies? Unbodies?) after the bodies disintegrated to nothing but bones. My dance and movement-trained sister might call it negative space. The plaster casts made of the non-body holes in hardened ash reveal the last moments of the people (and dogs) of Pompeii in disturbing detail. A combination of historical records, archaeological evidence, vulcanology (no, not Spock), and educated guessing allows scientists to piece together theories of who these people were and what their final moments might have been like. I've been fascinated with Pompeii ever since it was the cover story in an issue of National Geographic World when I was a kid. Natural disaster, mystery, and gruesome evidence: non-fiction doesn't get much better than that.