The Truth About the Titanic by Archibald Gracie. Gracie was a first class passenger who recorded his experiences immediately after the disaster and also interviewed other passengers; he died in December of that same year from trauma suffered by the tragedy.
So much has been written in the last century about Titanic (with Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember considered the best Titanic book, followed by his The Night Lives On, which was published after Titanic was found) and, in commemoration of the anniversary, there are some new titles I’m looking forward to reading:
Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s First Class Passengers and Their World by Hugh Brewster
Titanic: The Tragedy That Shook the World: One Century Later
Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From by Richard Davenport-Hines
Titanic Tragedy : a New Look at the Lost Liner by John Maxtone-Graham.
~Maria
*This post is the seventh in a series of blog posts of recommended historical non-fiction books.
**I did, now I will patiently wait for my library DVD to come in. :)
***There has yet to be the definitive Titanic movie for me though I have seen many excellent documentaries. The 1997 movie’s special effects were good, however, with so many rich, colorful, and true stories of the actual people who sailed on Titanic, I felt that this movie was a wasted effort in its made-up storyline. A sampling of some of the intrigue that was real life drama on Titanic:
American millionaire John Jacob Astor was honeymooning with his pregnant nineteen year old “child bride,” Madeleine Force, whom he had just married after his scandalous society divorce.
The Canadian Allisons (husband, wife, & daughter, Lorraine) refused to leave the ship (and subsequently perished) because they believed their baby son was still on board (when both nurse and baby were already safely away in a lifeboat).
And the abandoned French orphans of a father who, as the ship was sinking, handed his children to a woman getting in a lifeboat–it turned out he had kidnapped his children from his estranged wife and was traveling to America to start a new life. It wasn’t until their mother in France saw their picture in the paper that she knew where they had gone and traveled to America to bring them home.