Title: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
Author: Erik Larson
Publisher: Crown 2015
Genre: Nonfiction History
Pages: 430
Rating: 5/5 stars
Reading Challenges: Nonfiction Adventure; Read Your Freebies: 52 Books W22
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.
Ohhh. I saw this on the "Lucky Day" shelf (very new; no renewals books) and had to snap it up. I really enjoyed Larson's The Devil in the White City, so I figured this would also be good. And it was fascinating. Larson is a master storyteller weaving together all the narratives from participants in the event. It doesn't feel like a history tome. It feels like a suspenseful novel that just happens to be about a real event. My knowledge of the Lusitania, while probably more extensive than more people on the street, was fairly limited. I loved really diving into the passengers aboard the ship, the history of the u-boats, Room 40, and especially the inner workings of U-20. I sped through the book in just a few days. A definite recommendation for any history buffs out there.