From the #1 New York Times bestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania, published to coincide with the 100th 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 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, 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 captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster that helped place America on the road to war.