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New York, NY: Broadway Books. (2015) Paperback.
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania.
On
May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as
richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York,
bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants.
The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had
declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. For months, German
U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was
one of the era’s great transatlantic “greyhounds”—the fastest liner then
in service—and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous
faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had
kept civilian ships safe from attack.
Germany, however, was
determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the
captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. Meanwhile, an
ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger’s U-boat, but
told no one. As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward
Liverpool, an array of forces both grand and achingly small—hubris, a
chance fog, a closely guarded secret, and more—all converged to produce
one of the great disasters of history.
It is a story that many of
us think we know but don’t, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly,
switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of
America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and
suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative
characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering
female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost
to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect
of new love.
Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures
the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster whose intimate details
and true meaning have long been obscured by history.
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