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“Both terrifying and enthralling.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Thrilling, dramatic and powerful.”—NPR
“Thoroughly engrossing.”—George R.R. Martin
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.
Finalist for the Washington State Book Award • One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Miami Herald, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, LibraryReads, Indigo
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Creators
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Publisher
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Awards
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Release date
March 10, 2015 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780553551655
- File size: 376744 KB
- Duration: 13:04:52
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Languages
- English
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Levels
- Lexile® Measure: 1190
- Text Difficulty: 9-12
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Reviews
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As events escalate toward the momentous sinking of the British passenger liner LUSITANIA by a German U-boat during WWI, this comprehensive history reads almost like a novel, and that's exactly how Scott Brick narrates it. He adds emphasis where needed, goes quieter when appropriate, and varies his pacing effectively. His narration doesn't get in the way of the writing--it enhances it. And during the sometimes dry and lengthy history sections early in the work, he carries listeners along. In print, readers might be tempted to skim or even skip these passages, but Brick makes them easy to listen to. R.G.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine -
January 5, 2015
With a narrative as smooth as the titular passenger liner, Larson (In the Garden of Beasts) delivers a riveting account of one of the most tragic events of WWI. The fact a German U-boat sank the Lusitania off the coast of Ireland in May 1915 is undisputed, so Larson crafts the story as historical suspense by weaving information about the war and the development of submarine technology with an interesting cast of characters. He expertly builds tension up to the final encounter. An unanticipated sequence of events put the Lusitania in the path of Capt. Walther Schwieger’s U-20, and he didn’t hesitate to open fire. The Lusitania’s captain, the capable and accomplished William Thomas Turner, did everything in his power to avert the catastrophe, but fate intervened, taking the lives of 1,195 passengers and crew members, including 123 Americans. Despite the stunning loss of life, President Woodrow Wilson held firm to American neutrality in the war, at least in 1915. Larson convincingly constructs his case for what happened and why, and by the end, we care about the individual passengers we’ve come to know—a blunt reminder that war is, at its most basic, a matter of life and death. Illus. Agent: David Black, David Black Literary Agency. -
Starred review from April 27, 2015
Reader Brick’s measured, natural voice is a soothing counterweight to Larson’s tragic recounting of the 1915 sinking of the British passenger ship Lusitania by a German U-boat—one of the catalysts for the United States’ eventual entry into World War I on the side of the Allied Powers. Brick maintains a steady hand when describing scenes of heightened emotion, such as the critical 18 minutes it took the ship to sink. He does not engage in showy voice characterizations or individual accents for the story’s
international cast of characters, which includes English officers, American passengers, and the captain of the German U-boat (though Brick’s pronunciation of the book’s German words and names is excellent). Brick’s understated approach is fitting for this work of history, bringing poignant humanity to those who survived and those who lost their lives on the Lusitania. A Crown hardcover.
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