Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson

★★★★★
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From the bestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania.

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.

It is a story that many of us think we know but don’t, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love. 

Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster whose intimate details and true meaning have long been obscured by history.

In his most recent book, Erik Larson tackles the sinking of the Lusitania, a tragic event with a great historical impact. While high-school history class taught me the basics of the Lusitania and its impact, Larson’s Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania told me with excellent detail and description a fuller, more dramatic, and entirely fascinating story. It explores the circumstances surrounding the sinking from multiple perspectives, including the captain and passengers of the Lusitania, the captain of the German U-boat, and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, and gives its readers quite a thorough understanding. I really enjoyed reading Dead Wake and highly recommend it to readers who enjoy history. It’s an excellent read.

Thanks to Blogging for Books, I received a copy of Dead Wake and the opportunity to provide an honest review. I was not required to write a positive review, and all the opinions I have expressed are my own.