quipxotic

Just a quick review now that I've finished this book by Erik Larson. In general it was good; like I mentioned last time, Larson includes lots of humanizing details about the main players. He also clearly did plenty of research in archives and libraries as journals, letters, diaries, and account books are heavily quoted. Sometimes I think he goes a bit overboard in the amount of details he includes. For example, there are long passages about Pres. Wilson's courting of Edith Bolling Galt, which don't really add much other than reinforcing the idea that Wilson was distracted during May 1915 and didn't give the Lusitania or the war the attention either deserved. If Wilson comes across as silly and unfocused, Winston Churchill and the rest of the British Admiralty and their secret information gathering group, "Room 40," seem to be either actively manipulating the situation to enable the Lusitania to be sunk or, at the very least, capitalizing on it in an effort to bring the US into the war.

But, aside from that, there's so much here that I wasn't aware of regarding this event. While I'm not an expert on World War I, I thought I knew a bit about it...enough to know that the Lusitania was one of the causes of the US declaring war. But somehow I missed that the United States didn't go to war immediately after the sinking, which is obvious if you know the dates of both events, or that so many other US ships were sunk after the Lusitania. I thought the attack happened at night, an idea I no doubt picked up from the period propaganda posters; but it didn't, it happened at roughly 2:10 in the afternoon on a bright, clear May day on an oddly calm sea. I didn't know how huge the ship was, more in line with a Titanic than anything I'd pictured, or that it sunk in about 20 minutes.

The main image that sticks with me is the description of the ocean right after the sinking - hundreds of hands reaching up out of the water, trying to reach for help that wasn't there, and slowly disappearing.

Since it's so long and detailed, this is a book better consumed in audiobook form, I think. The voice actor reading it, Scott Brick, is generally good, but he does have that tendency you often find with voiceovers on true crime documentaries. You know, where you can tell they hear the dramatic "dun Dun DUN" after every statement and, after a while, you almost hear it too? That does get a bit annoying, but it wasn't enough to make me want to stop listening.