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Title: A Hollywood B Movie
Review: Pompeii was the first Harris novel I have read. I had looked forward to it based on some reviews only to be disappointed. He did a fine job with the historical and scientific material, but his plot was no better than the plots of Hollywood B movies of the 1940's and 50's. The central character, the young aqueduct engineer, was able to go without sleep or food for three days and survive the fantastic forces of the eruption of Vesuvius - more than once! Moreover, the moral stance of the novel is that it really did not matter what happened to all the other people in the path of the eruption - not just vile former slave now rich and manipulative land owner - as long as the young engineer rescued the young woman he met briefly just two days before the catastrophe. I think Harris really knows what are the geophysical consequences of a volcanic eruption, but not the human, and that is a serious fault as his central theme is the human response to the eruption.
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