- Title: Pompeii The Living City
- Authors: Alex Butterworth and Ray Laurence
- Year Published: 2005 (St. Martin’s Press)
- Year Purchased: 2005
- Source: History Book Club
- About: History should be a living, breathing, laughing, squirming thing. Alive, thought-provoking, uncomfortable, enlightening. Not boring or stilted. When presented in book form, you shouldn’t want to skip ahead to find the good bits; it should all be good bits. Fortunately, Butterworth and Laurence agree. Their Pompeii The Living City is as vivid, varied and fast-paced as the subject itself. The result is an indelibly engaging volume that pulls on your senses until it feels-almost, if only in the back of the mind-like a real-time experience.
- Motivation: I’ve loved ancient history since I was a kid and dreamed big dreams of being an anthropologist or archaeologist when I grew up. Well, kind of; I never seriously wanted to do anything but write. Kid me envisioned the anthropologist/archaeologist thing as kind of a side-line or hobby. Ah, youth!
- Times Read: 1
- Random Excerpt/Page 130: “In all respects, the beauty industry was big business in Pompeii. Affluent women struggled to emulate the idealised femininity of the frescoes on their walls, who stared into polished bronze or silver mirrors with justified self-regard, their dressing tables bare of any artificial means of enhancement. Yet the great range of ingeniously wrought bottles that have been found testifies to the lengths to which some women in the real world would go to preserve or improve their looks.”
- Happiness Scale: 9
House of the Faun in Pompeii, Italy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A Year in Books/Day 115: Pompeii The Living City
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A Small Press Life: Books. Art. Writing. Life. Tea. 