Frank H. (perryfran) reviewed on 3/14/2019 + 1223 more book reviews

This was a very engaging account of the last night of the Titanic. The book was originally published in 1955 and Walter Lord was able to interview many of the survivors as well as research the written accounts of the sinking to come up with this really mesmerizing narrative. It basically starts out with the Titanic hitting an iceberg on that tragic night of April 14-15, 1912 and then details what happened aboard ship. Many passengers were unsure as to what happened up until it became obvious and even then many felt the ship would never sink. Of course, the Titanic was billed as unsinkable and many could not believe it was doomed. And then there were all the fateful occurrences that helped lead to the disaster such as the ignorance of the radio operators on the nearby Californian that failed to come to their rescue, the lack of a proper number of lifeboats, the way the ship hit the iceberg, etc. Lord poses it as follows: "What troubled people especially was not just the tragedy â or even its needlessness â but the element of fate in it all. If the Titanic had heeded any of the six ice messages on Sunday ... if ice conditions had been normal ... if the night had been rough or moonlit ... if she had seen the berg 15 seconds sooner â or 15 seconds later ... if she had hit the ice any other way ... if her watertight bulkheads had been one deck higher ... if she had carried enough boats ... if the Californian had only come ... Had any one of those 'ifs' turned out right, every life might have been saved. But they all went against her â a classic Greek tragedy."

This was truly a superb piece of nonfiction narrative. The Titanic disaster has been written about extensively and made into several movies including A Night to Remember made in 1958 and the 1997 blockbuster Titanic which I actually quite enjoyed. But for an intense compelling true account of the disaster, this book probably is hard to top!

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