The Titanic: Disaster of a Century

The centennial edition of this definitive book reveals new findings, photos, and interviews that shed light on the world’s most famous marine disaster. On the fatal night of April 15, 1912, the world’s largest moving object collided with an iceberg and disappeared beneath the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean in less than three hours. More than fifteen hundred people on the ship perished, making it one of the deadliest peacetime marine disasters in modern history. But why was the ship sailing through waters well known to be a “mass of floating ice”? Why were there too few lifeboats? Why did crew members make up a full third of the survivors? Based on eyewitness accounts, the sensational evidence of the US Senate hearings that followed the disaster, and the results of the 1985 Woods Hole expedition that photographed the ship, this evocative account recreates the vessel’s last desperate hours afloat and fully addresses the questions that continue to haunt the tragedy of the RMS Titanic. “Riveting.” —Associated Press “A rousing adjunct to Walter Lord’s social history of the sinking, and thorough-going on the causes as far as they can be determined.” —Kirkus Reviews