Book Review: Dead Wake

Dead Wake:The Last Crossing of the Lusitaniaby Erik LarsonCrown, 20152015 marks the 100^th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Lusitania by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915, at the cost of 1,198 of the roughly 2000 people on board. 1, 265 of the dead had been passengers – men, women, families, a great many children – and this gave the British government an unbeatable public relations coup in its propaganda war against Germany, despite the fact that the Germans were entirely correct to consider the ship a vessel of war, since it was carrying munitions intended for front-line British troops. And since 128 of the dead were Americans, the publicity coup reached across the Atlantic and may have played a part in convincing the United States to enter the war in 1917.In other words, it's a pivotal historical event ripe for narrative re-visiting on the occasion of its anniversary, and it's for this reason that we should all spare a moment of profound sympathy for Penny Wilson and Greg King, whose book Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Era, new from St. Martin's and thoroughly excellent, is destined to play second-fiddle to the season's other book on the Lusitania, Dead Wake by Erik Larson, the mega-bestselling author of such books as Isaac's Storm, Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck, and the brilliant In the Garden of Beasts. If there was a book about Michelangelo published in the same week in 1961 as Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy, that book too would deserve a moment of sympathy.Larson's book is, predictably, also excellent. He opens with a fast-moving and dauntingly thorough stem-to-stern look at the ship herself, which was one of the fastest vessels afloat and consumed a thousand tons of coal a day while at sea. But Larson's specialty has always been the personalities of history, and that's certainly the case here. He settles down to the onboard rhythms of the ship and colors in one living little moment after another:

Complaints had to be taken seriously, and there were always complaints. Passengers grumbled that food from the Kitchen Grill came to their tables cold. This issue was at least partly resolved by changing the route waiters had to walk. The typewriters in the typing room were too noisy and annoyed the occupants of adjacent staterooms. The hours for typing were shortened. Ventilation in some rooms was less than ideal, a stubborn flaw that drove passengers to open their portholes. There was a problem, too, with the upper-level dining room in first class. Its windows opened onto a promenade used by third-class passengers who had an annoying habit of peering in through the windows at the posh diners within.

His special fascination seems to be the Lusitania's captain, William Thomas Turner, under whose taskmaster naval discipline the ship broke all existing speed records for her class. In 1909, the Lusitania traveled from Ireland to New York in four days, eleven hours, and forty-two minutes, which averages out to about 25 knots. “Until then, “ Larson notes, “that kind of speed had seemed an impossibility.”Of course, captains on Cunard line luxury vessels (and there were none more luxurious than Lusitania) were responsible for a good deal more than breaking speed records. They were company ambassadors, as Larson notes:

But a captain also served a role less easy to define. He was three parts mariner, one part club director. He was a to be a willing guide for first-class passengers wishing to learn more about the mysteries of the ship; he was to preside over dinners with prominent passengers; he was to walk the ship and engage passengers in conversation about the weather, their reasons for crossing the Atlantic, the books they were reading.

Adding tartly, “Turner would sooner bathe in bilge.”Dead Wake is another triumph of popular history for an author who's so far had nothing but triumphs. And since it'll be attractively discounted at all the major bookstores, readers interested in the subject could use the money they save to buy a copy of Wilson & King's book as well; that would be an anniversary well-covered.