From the number-one New York Times best-selling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania, published to coincide with the one-hundredth anniversary of the disaster.
On May 1, 1915, 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 anxious. Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone, and for months its U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era’s great transatlantic “Greyhounds”, 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. He knew, moreover, that his ship–the fastest then in service–could outrun any threat.
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 ways 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, mystery, and real-life suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope Riddle to President Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love. Gripping and important, Dead Wake…
A CAPTIVATING & DEEPLY DISTURBING ACCOUNT OF A MONUMENTAL TRAGEDY! Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson is published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the luxury ocean liner Lusitania. It is a fiercely gripping historical non-fiction that sheds much light not only on its immediate subject but also on other relevant topics of the period such as World War I, Europe, America and the politics of the time. It is difficult to put down Dead Wake once you get started. As only he can, Larson’s history comes alive through…
Excellent Narrative of Terrible Attack DEAD WAKE: THE LAST CROSSING OF THE LUSITANIA is the story of a horrific event that ended the lives of over 1,000 people. The sinking also played a key role in changing America’s view toward Germany, and helped change America’s “neutral” position in World War I. It was two years after this sinking that the United States declared war on Germany.
The Mystery of Room 40 and the Sinking of Humanity Erik Larson is not capable of writing anything less than a gripping account of history. All of his previous books have been spellbinding accounts of storms, cities, crimes, inventions, ships and/or war. In DEAD WAKE: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, Larson returns to the subjects of war and ships and stirs in a potent mixture of international politics as well as a little romance to once again seduce his readers with a contemporary view of an historical situation.