Larson has little trouble stitching all this together. Or at least that’s what the most lovestruck moments of “Dead Wake,” backed up by Wilson’s syrupy letters to her, seem to say. It has threads about the captains of the two vessels the buildup to war the many passengers’ individual circumstances the cat-and-mouse tactics of subs and their prey the sinking and its aftermath and a very distracted President Woodrow Wilson, who was at least as busy wooing his second wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, as he was paying attention to international affairs. Benjamin Benschneiderīut in other hands it could be a very diffuse and sprawling story. Debate and conspiracy theories still persist about how and why the big ship was denied British naval protection or the crucial knowledge that a German submarine was close enough to strike.Įrik Larson’s books include “In the Garden of Beasts.” Credit. But the Lusitania was a ship carrying nearly 2,000 people, including Americans, at a time when the United States had not entered World War I. Larson’s book, had already taken a shot at a hospital ship without qualms. Walther Schwieger, commander of the submarine U-20 and a major figure in Mr. There had been instances of what was then called “frightfulness,” a more polite name for terrorism, preceding the Lusitania attack. The torpedoing of the Lusitania in May 1915 made it clear that sinking passenger ships could occur as acts of war.

The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 shattered the idea that huge ocean liners were invulnerable. But these two tragedies at sea had very different ramifications. A lot of people think “shipwreck = Titanic” and stop right there. Larson didn’t know much about the Lusitania when he embarked upon this project. He points out that one passenger carried a gold seal with the Latin motto “Tuta Tenebo,” or “I will keep you safe.” Wrong words, wrong ship.Īs he freely admits, Mr. Larson has an eye for haunting, unexploited detail. There can’t be many new sources to draw on 100 years after the fact, but Mr. This does not seem like an opportunistic book, or a cobbled-together clip job full of previously known information. Would he be writing about the Lusitania if the anniversary were not imminent? To its credit, “Dead Wake” doesn’t read that way. As he demonstrated with “In the Garden of Beasts” and “The Devil in the White City,” he knows how to pick details that have maximum soapy potential and then churn them until they foam. Larson is an old hand at treating nonfiction like high drama. But the most attention-getting of the bunch is guaranteed to be Erik Larson’s “Dead Wake,” because Mr. This May is the 100th anniversary of the attack on the grand British ocean liner by a German submarine, and the expected crop of books will commemorate the occasion. The Lusitania is about to sink - and sink, and sink - all over again.

DEAD WAKE by Erik Larson