The Titanic wrecked on April 15, 1912, but interest in the tragic maritime disaster continues to this day. These books cover the story from every possible angle: engineering, socio-economic, and personal.
Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their World (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $1.99 as a Kindle Monthly Deal)
Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage takes us behind the paneled doors of the Titanic’s elegant private suites to present compelling, memorable portraits of her most notable passengers. The intimate atmosphere onboard history’s most famous ship is recreated as never before.
The Titanic has often been called “an exquisite microcosm of the Edwardian era,” but until now, her story has not been presented as such. In Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage, historian Hugh Brewster seamlessly interweaves personal narratives of the lost liner’s most fascinating people with a haunting account of the fateful maiden crossing. Employing scrupulous research and featuring 100 rarely-seen photographs, he accurately depicts the ship’s brief life and tragic denouement, presenting the very latest thinking on everything from when and how the lifeboats were loaded to the last tune played by the orchestra. Yet here too is a convincing evocation of the table talk at the famous Widener dinner party held in the Ritz Restaurant on the last night. And here we also experience the rustle of elegant undergarments as first-class ladies proceed down the grand staircase in their soigné evening gowns, some of them designed by Lady Duff Gordon, the celebrated couterière, who was also on board.
Another well-known passenger was the artist Frank Millet, who led an astonishing life that seemed to encapsulate America’s Gilded Age—from serving as a drummer boy in the Civil War to being the man who made Chicago’s White City white for the 1893 World Exposition. His traveling companion Major Archibald Butt was President Taft’s closest aide and was returning home for a grueling fall election campaign that his boss was expected to lose. Today, both of these once-famous men are almost forgotten, but their ship-mate Margaret Tobin Brown lives on as “the Unsinkable Molly Brown,” a name that she was never called during her lifetime.
Millionaires John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim, writer Helen Churchill Candee, movie actress Dorothy Gibson, aristocrat Noelle, the Countess of Rothes, and a host of other travelers on this fateful crossing are also vividly brought to life within these pages. Through them, we gain insight into the arts, politics, culture, and sexual mores of a world both distant and near to our own. And with them, we gather on the Titanic’s sloping deck on that cold, starlit night and observe their all-too-human reactions as the disaster unfolds. More than ever, we ask ourselves, “What would we have done?”
The Story of the Wreck of the Titanic (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at 99 cents as a Kindle Monthly Deal)
More than a century after the greatest seafaring disaster of all time, the tragic story of the R.M.S. Titanic continues to fascinate readers.
Just before midnight on April 15, 1912, the Titanic struck a gigantic iceberg in the icy waters of the North Atlantic, on its way to New York.
Within a few short hours the world’s largest ship, supposedly unsinkable, had sunk beneath the waves.
Over 2,000 people were on board for the Titanic’s maiden voyage, people from all echelons of society across two continents, but of them only seven hundred were saved.
Picked up and taken by the Carpathia to their original destination, the event still raw in their minds, public inquiries were launched, the need for improvement in maritime safety swiftly becoming evident.
Originally published just months after The Wreck and Sinking of the Titanic, this sobering yet sensationalist volume — written and edited by Marshall Everett — includes a collection of survivors’ accounts, including close escapes and unparalleled acts of heroism.
Marshall Everett (1863-1939) was a popular writer of the early twentieth century. His other works include Tragic story of America’s greatest disaster : tornado, flood and fire in Ohio, Indiana, Nebraska and Mississippi Valley and Startling experiences in the three wars : war in China, the Philippines, South Africa.
A Night To Remember (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $9.49)
Lord’s classic bestseller, and the definitive account of the unsinkable ship’s fateful last hours
At first, no one but the lookout recognized the sound. Passengers described it as the impact of a heavy wave, a scraping noise, or the tearing of a long calico strip. In fact, it was the sound of the world’s most famous ocean liner striking an iceberg, and it served as the death knell for 1,500 souls.
In the next two hours and forty minutes, the maiden voyage of the Titanic became one of history’s worst maritime accidents. As the ship’s deck slipped closer to the icy waterline, women pleaded with their husbands to join them on lifeboats. Men changed into their evening clothes to meet death with dignity. And in steerage, hundreds fought bitterly against certain death. At 2:15 a.m. the ship’s band played “Autumn.” Five minutes later, the Titanic was gone.
Based on interviews with sixty-three survivors, Lord’s moment-by-moment account is among the finest books written about one of the twentieth century’s bleakest nights.
The Night Lives On: The Untold Stories and Secrets Behind the Sinking of the “Unsinkable” Ship-Titanic (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $7.99)
Three decades after his landmark work A Night to Remember, Walter Lord revisits the Titanic
Years after A Night to Remember stoked the fires of public interest in the doomed RMS Titanic, the clamor for details about April 14, 1912, has not abated. As die-hard professional and amateur historians—“rivet counters,” they are called—puzzle over minute details of the ship’s last hours, a wealth of facts and myth have emerged. Revisiting the subject more than thirty years after his first study, Lord dives into this harrowing story, whose power to intrigue has only grown a century after the Titanic’s sinking.
Was the ship really christened before setting sail on its maiden voyage? What song did the band play as water spilled over the ship’s bow? How did the ship’s wireless operators fail so badly, and why did the nearby Californian, just ten miles away when the Titanic struck the iceberg, not come to the rescue? Lord answers these questions and more, in a gripping investigation of the night when 1,500 victims were lost to the sea.
The Titanic: The History and Legacy of the World’s Most Famous Ship from 1907 to Today (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $4.99)
“I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel.” – Captain Edward J. Smith
Just before midnight on April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic, the largest ship in the world, hit an iceberg, starting a chain of events that would ultimately make it history’s most famous, and notorious, ship. In the over 100 years since it sank on its maiden voyage, the Titanic has been the subject of endless fascination, as evidenced by the efforts to find its final resting spot, the museums full of its objects, and the countless books, documentaries, and movies made about the doomed ocean liner. Thanks to the dramatization of the Titanic’s sinking and the undying interest in the story, millions of people are familiar with various aspects of the ship’s demise, and the nearly 1,500 people who died in the North Atlantic in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912. The sinking of the ship is still nearly as controversial now as it was over 100 years ago, and the drama is just as compelling.
The Titanic was neither the first nor last big ship to sink, so it’s clear that much of its appeal stems from the nature of ship itself. Indeed, the Titanic stands out not just for its end but for its beginning, specifically the fact that it was the most luxurious passenger ship ever built at the time. In addition to the time it took to come up with the design, the giant ship took a full three years to build, and no effort or cost was spared to outfit the Titanic in the most lavish ways. Given that the Titanic was over 100 feet tall, nearly 900 feet long, and over 90 feet wide, it’s obvious that those who built her and provided all of its famous amenities had plenty of work to do. The massive ship was carrying thousands of passengers and crew members, each with their own experiences on board, and the various amenities offered among the different classes of passengers ensured that life on some decks of the ship was quite different than life on others.
Almost everyone is familiar with what happened to the Titanic during its maiden voyage and the tragedy that followed, but the construction of the Titanic is often overlooked, despite being an amazing story itself, one that combined comfort and raw power with the world’s foremost technological advances. Nonetheless, the seeds of the Titanic’s destruction were sown even before it left for its first and last journey.
Similarly, the drama involved with the sinking of the Titanic often obscures the important aftermath of the disaster, particularly the several investigations conducted on both sides of the Atlantic that sought to figure out not only why the Titanic sank but future changes that could be made in order to protect ships and passengers in the future. In fact, the course of the investigations was interesting in itself, especially since the British and Americans reached wildly different conclusions about what went wrong and led to the ship’s demise.
The Titanic examines the entire history and legacy of the ship, from its construction to its sinking, as well as the investigations and changes that followed, the discovery of the wreck in 1985, and even the current events surrounding the ship. Along the way, life aboard the Titanic is analyzed through passengers’ accounts, as are the tales of survival and death that continue to resonate. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Titanic like never before, in no time at all.
*Includes dozens of pictures
*Includes a bibliography for further reading
*Includes a table of contents
*Describes the construction of the Titanic, life aboard the ship during its maiden voyage, the sinking of the ship, rescue efforts, and the discovery and exploration of the wreck
*Includes accounts written by passengers, crew members, White Star Line officials, and explorers of the wreck
* * *
Tech Tip of the Week: Another Day, Another Adobe Flash Malware Warning
* * *