Disaster of the century!
Read all about it!
Titanic Legacy
The Titanic: The Extraordinary Story of the 'Unsinkable' Ship
Titanic: Legacy of the World's Greatest Ocean Liner
Lost Liners
Raise the Titanic!
Every Man for Himself
Maiden Voyage
Polar, the Titanic Bear
Titanic
A Night to Remember
Last Dinner on the Titanic: Menus and Recipies from the Great Liner
Reviews by Michael Sims
The Greek gods didn't like it when mortals got too cocky. Therefore they bequeathed to the world the useful concepts of hubris (overweening pride) and ate (inevitable retribution). With epic poetry and drama out of fashion these days, frequently such moral lessons fall to journalists. And apparently no topic makes journalists salivate like the fate of the "doomed" ship Titanic.
Granted, on one level a passion for the Titanic is as morbid as rubbernecking when you drive past an auto accident. But the magnitude is rather different. The great ocean liners were the pinnacle of technology, and inspired grand comparisons -- the scale of the pyramids, the grandeur of Versailles, the daring of Icarus. They were the daydreams of Jules Verne come to life, and in retrospect they look like the last gasp of technological optimism.
"The sinking of the Titanic was our century's first collective nightmare," Paul Heyer writes in "Titanic Legacy: Disaster as Media Event and Myth" (Praeger, $39.95, 0275953521). "The confused and anguished response it provoked -- culture shock is the term that comes to mind -- can be seen as a harbinger of reactions that would follow Hiroshima, the Holocaust, JFK's assassination, and most recently, the Oklahoma City bombing."
As a result of that fascination, there seems to be no end to books about the Titanic -- nonfiction, children's books, novels. With James Cameron's new movie fanning the flames again, BookPage offers a field guide to exploring this famous disaster.
Not surprisingly, Reader's Digest has an entry in the field -- "The Titanic: The Extraordinary Story of the 'Unsinkable' Ship," by Geoff Tibballs ($19.95, 0895779536). Fast-moving to the point of breathless, it tells the story clearly and concisely, and it's well illustrated. But for the true Titaniphile, it only whets the appetite.
More substantial is a new collaboration between the guardians of the Titanic wreck site and the Discovery Channel, "Titanic: Legacy of the World's Greatest Ocean Liner," by Susan Wels (Time/Life, $34.95, 0783552610). With old and new photographs, paintings and eerily moody computer reconstructions, this book adds up to one of the best on the subject. William F. Buckley, Jr., of all people, sets the stage with an introductory account of his own visit to the wreck site.
For a broader view -- historical reconstructions of other sunken ships as well as the Titanic -- turn to the comprehensive and ambitious book "Lost Liners," by Robert D. Ballard and Rick Archbold, with masterful photorealistic paintings by Ken Marschall (Hyperion, $60, 0786862963). (It's worth noting that in Greek mythology, Hyperion was one of the Titans.) No other book achieves the same you-are-there feeling. The Lusitania, Mauretania, Normandie, Andrea Doria, Olympic, Titanic -- all come vividly to life through the paintings and photographs and artifacts shrewdly juxtaposed to recreate not just an event but an era.
Naturally novelists can't resist such a dramatic story. In the 1970s, bestseller machine Clive Cussler sent his literally trademarked adventure hero Dirk Pitt to "Raise the Titanic!" (Pocket,$7.99, 067172519X). Cussler wove into the adolescent antics a hurricane, a radioactive element actually named byzanium and of course battles with Soviet spies.
The Titanic has captured the imaginations of serious novelists, too. In 1996 two authors published novels about it. Beryl Bainbridge's "Every Man for Himself" (Carroll & Graf, $10.95, 0786704675) was highly acclaimed by critics and even nominated for the Booker Prize. And Cynthia Bass offered "Maiden Voyage" (Bantam,$12.95, 0553378899). Apparently history fuels Bass' fictional imagination; she is the author of the historical novel "Sherman's March."
In a more direct way, the Titanic inspired an unlikely children's book by Daisy Corning Stone Pedden, "Polar, The Titanic Bear" (Little, Brown, $17.95, 0316806250). Unlike Paddington and Pooh, Polar narrates his own story -- and the story is true. Pedden wrote the account of her own and her family's survival of the sinking of the Titanic, as seen through the eyes of their son's toy bear, in 1913. A relative discovered the manuscript in an attic and published it in 1994. The book is beautifully illustrated and quietly authoritative in its descriptions of the disaster. An epilogue supplements the narrative with photographs of the family and the era.
The ship itself may have sunk for good (except in Cussler's novel), but the story lives on. The hot new incarnation is James Cameron's movie, titled merely "Titanic," postponed again and again but finally slated for this month. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslett as a pair of (fictional) lovers, with Kathy Bates as the unsinkable Molly Brown. The film has a budget worthy of the ship itself, and we can only hope it doesn't suffer the same fate.
In mid-December HarperCollins publishes James Cameron's "Titanic" (hardcover $50, 006757516; paperback $20, 0006490603) to accompany the film. In his foreword, Cameron echoes Paul Heyer's remarks: "Titanic was the first big wake-up call of the twentieth century. Technology had been delivering a steady diet of miracles for the better part of two decades -- radio communications, airplanes, motion pictures -- and people had started to take this neverending spiral of progress for granted. And then, boom."
The bibliography of responses to the disaster would be woefully incomplete without Walter Lord's 1955 classic "A Night to Remember" (Bantam, $5.99, 0553278274). It is still the best known (thanks partially to the 1958 movie version) and is quite possibly the best written. With novelistic detail, Lord weaves together the stories of many of the 1,500 passengers and crew who lost their lives. Pointing out that the sinking of the Titanic was like the sudden end of an entire small town, Lord closes his book with a list of the lost and the rescued.
Incidentally, Lord describes the eeriest coincidence in all of the Titanic lore. An earlier book entitled "Futility," by Morgan Robertson, told the story of the largest ocean liner ever built, which, packed with the rich and famous, crashed into an iceberg one April night. Robertson's book was fiction, published in 1898. The ship's length, displacement, speed and carrying capacity were similar to those of the Titanic, which didn't come along until 14 years later. Robertson's ship was named the Titan.
In this feast of disaster books, for dessert we offer, yes, a cookbook -- "Last Dinner on the Titanic: Menus and Recipes from the Great Liner" (Hyperion, $24.95, 078686303X). Okay, the topic seems laughable, but it's a handsome and absorbing browser book. This time the photos emphasize the dining areas. "Every year on or near April 14," Walter Lord writes in his introduction, "a surprisingly large number of sentimentalists sit down to a dinner based on the menus that survive from that final day." Well, now you and yours can go through the same morbid ritual. And, to add an appropriately somber tone to the proceedings, April 14 is the day before the Ides of April -- tax day. The gods always love a nice irony.
Michael Sims is the author of "Darwin's Orchestra" and is an unsinkable contributor to BookPage.
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