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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