As he demonstrated with “In the Garden of Beasts” and “The Devil in the White City,” he knows how to pick details that have maximum soapy potential and then churn them until they foam. Larson is an old hand at treating nonfiction like high drama. But the most attention-getting of the bunch is guaranteed to be Erik Larson’s “Dead Wake,” because Mr. This May is the 100th anniversary of the attack on the grand British ocean liner by a German submarine, and the expected crop of books will commemorate the occasion. R.The Lusitania is about to sink - and sink, and sink - all over again. “A sort of geopolitical thriller, one that reads like a brainy mash-up of James Cameron’s Titanic and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.” - New York Times “Both terrifying and enthralling…Larson’s incredible detail pulls you under and never lets you go.” - Entertainment Weekly 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. 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. 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. 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. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger’s U-boat, but told no one.
Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. 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. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. 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. Dead Wake The Last Crossing of the Lusitaniaįrom the #1 New York Times bestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania
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