Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson is a master class in riveting storytelling, as well as an important event in world history.
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.
If you have any interest in history, look to Erik Larson first! He is an amazing writer who brings history alive.
Larson, Erik. (2015). Dead Wake. New York: Crown Publishing.
