Introduction:
Our first Erik Larson book. Though the books are based on true history they may read like a suspenseful thriller. The events we may have read in a few sentences from a high school textbook are expounded, elaborated, and described in the full richness of that the particular event deserves. Game changing moments in a war or country's history are not simply a date and facts but a setting of an amazing tale.
Overview:
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.
Book Details:
Paperback: 430 pages
Publisher: Crown Publishers; 1st edition (March 10, 2015)
ISBN-10: 0307408868
ISBN-13: 978-0307408860
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