Dead Wake - Erik Larson
eriklarsonbooks.com
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.

I had picked this up at a used book store a long ways back after reading nothing but rock bios for a while - thought a little historical non-fiction could beef my brain up.

Took about a year, but I finished it yesterday and the timing of the whole submersible ship implosion while doing some tourist viewing of the sunk Titanic lined up in a pretty unsettling way for me.

As far as the book goes, this is my second from Erik Larson, the first being Devil in the White City, which was excellent as was this one. Erik Larson has an incredible skill for writing a mix of textbook material and humanizing detail that allows you to both learn and care, while organized in a way that builds suspense despite the events being common knowledge. It almost reads like historical fiction, his research is very thorough into both the people he describes and the events that happened, providing context to both that creates a rich and educational reading experience.

Worth noting:

  • Woodrow Wilson spends the whole book being a total simp and an emotional sad sack.
  • Winston Churchill is both admirable and contemptible in his actions, in modern times he would be seen in a much more negative light.
  • While making it clear that the German U-Boat commander Walter Schweiger is a cold and calculated man focused entirely on sinking ships with little care for the human toll, even he at times is a relatable character.

While the current events aren’t totally related as instead of a torpedo submarine we are currently talking about a luxury submersible used to do sight-seeing of a passenger ship’s wreckage, the first hand accounts of the survivors of the Lusitania’s sinking paint an absolutely horrifying picture of living through a shipwreck.

I never watched Titanic (I only watch good movies, thank you) (jk) but to imagine the absolute chaos and carnage of thousands of people in the middle of a freezing ocean, getting off the boat just to still be maimed or set adrift amongst the debris and surrounded by corpses and other terrified people… it’s rough.

Good read, check it out.

  • patchymoose@beehaw.org
    1·
    1 year ago

    Definitely need to check this one out. Larson in general is such a great author (at least to me) because he tells the personal stories of people involved in history that a really make it interesting.

    If you haven’t read it, I’d also recommend “In the Garden of Beasts”, also by Larson. It’s about the American Ambassador to Germany and his family living through the rise of Nazi Germany and how surreal the entire thing is.

    • No thanks, my friend@beehaw.orgOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’ll check it out for sure! Like you said, it’s human stories in historical context and he has such a knack for that. So much historical non-fiction struggles to either tell the human story while also providing the straight facts in an easily consumable way, or tell the history while providing human color. He is really great at striking a good balance with it.