Charles Pellegrino’s “Ghosts of Vesuvius” (William Morrow, $25.95, 489 pages) is as lugubrious as most books about ground zero and has the added attraction of voluminous soul-searching involving the Gnostic gospels. Mr. Pellegrino’s pacing does not match that of “The Da Vinci Code,” but his portentousness may. A forensic archaeologist by trade, Mr. Pellegrino has previously written about Sodom and Gomorrah, Atlantis, the Apollo mission, and the Titanic. He turns his trendy eye here to a dual study of the wreckage of the World Trade Center and Pompeii.

His book begins with a 100-page prologue on the history of Earth – putting things into perspective. Bizarrely, he tracks the size of the human population throughout the ages by imagining a giant cube made of closely stacked humans, measured in terms of skyscrapers. Going backwards in time, from 1966 to 1934, “The human cube has shrunk by the height of the Empire State Building.” Similarly, Mr. Pellegrino charts the rate of continental drift as matching the rate of human fingernail growth.

Yet Mr. Pellegrino explicitly denies that man is the measure of all things: “we are of nature, not above it.” The Earth (with its meteorite cousins) is more likely to destroy us than we are to destroy it. Such is the conceit of a man who studies volcanoes.

Mr. Pellegrino’s prose is perhaps pitched to excite the nonscientist reader, but it is more evidently self inspired, driven by the quasi-religious addiction to awe that Hollywood exploits in movies like “Contact.” Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke make numerous cameos in “Ghosts of Vesuvius,” and Mr. Pellegrino often interrupts himself with Eliotic fragments between para graphs: “(Time … time … time will have its say).”

The italics, parentheses, and ellipses are Pellegrino’s. Indeed, ellipses capture Pellegrino’s laudable, if slightly sarcastic, resolution that “if you happen to be conducting your scientific explorations properly, every new answer you think you’ve come up with should be kicking the doors open to a half dozen new questions.” No implication is conclusive, an ellipsis would say. In practice, Mr. Pellegrino uses the ellipses to imply a conclusion or a connection where he couldn’t easily make one using real words: “Rome, the House of Mica, the ‘Valkyrie,’ Mark III … Past, present, future … The Chinese say that if you want to create something new, you must learn to love something old.”

The connection between the ruins of Pompeii and ground zero is similarly mystic. But Mr. Pellegrino’s forensics bring both sites to life, and these passages alone would justify his volume without the reams of apocrypha and cosmology that Mr. Pellegrino unnecessarily includes. He describes “shock cocoons,” sections of a building that are preserved while everything around them disintegrates in the heat of an explosion. He theorizes about the aerodynamics that saved some of those survivors who were still within the South Tower when it collapsed.

This can be fantastic stuff, sounding like a smart young pyromaniac’s protracted fantasy, as here about Port Authority police officers Aaron Greenstein and Robert Vargas: “Indeed, it was probably the slightly earlier Greenstein shock wave, racing south toward northbound Vargas – racing toward Vargas from the world’s largest air bag – that met and overpowered the northward wave front, stopped Vargas from being propelled any further, and saved his life.”

Mr. Pellegrino applies his forensics to the controversy surrounding 4 Truck, an incident reported in William Langewiesche’s book “American Ground.” The firefighters were accused of looting a number of neatly folded Gap jeans before the towers fell. Mr. Pellegrino convincingly describes how “downblast” and “surge” sometimes hurl objects great distances with little damage: perfectly stacked law books, to use his example, can fly considerable distances while retaining their alphabetical order. The neatly stacked jeans were distributed in a pattern consistent with these phenomena.

Mr. Pellegrino here does good service to the memories of the firefighters involved. Yet at the same time, he coyly withholds both Mr. Langewiesche’s name and his claim that the looting story was only offered as a species of rumor.

Passion is doubtless a prerequisite to adventures like Mr. Pellegrino’s, and digressive speculation is perhaps the essence of archeology. But Mr. Pellegri no overdoes it. He pretends that the scribes of singed papyrus scrolls are “whispering to us across time.” He celebrates the post-September 11 tradition of placing roses by unearthed skeletons. He makes much of the fact that after Hiroshima the United States did not immediately try to conquer the world: “the Americans approached nuclear adolescence with a single governing principle, articulated by Cincinnatus, resurrected by Washington, and adopted as the unbreakable habit of power with restraint.”

Is sentimentality of this magnitude compatible with good science? It is certainly not compatible with good reading. “Ghosts of Vesuvius” succeeds only when Mr. Pellegrino’s fascinating subjects subsume the sound of his pieties.