Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

· Sold by Crown
4.4
185 reviews
Ebook
480
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania

“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

Ratings and reviews

4.4
185 reviews
Gingersnap In Iowa
December 26, 2019
As the author said he remembered the sinking of the Lusitania, in history class as being stuck between the Civil War and Pearl harbor. That's probably true for most people myself included. The background of the passengers and who survived and who didn't makes this book more real to the reader. Yes this is what happened, this could have prevented it and why wasn't something done to prevent it. Eric Larson is a great author.
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Catherine Mack
June 25, 2015
Lusitain by Erik Larson. A lot of facts about the United States Government are left out. It shows
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Gary Edmunds
June 16, 2015
I devoured Isaac's Storm. Thunderstruck was tremendous. Devil in the White City? Phenomenal. But this one... Was tough sledding. Many nights could only get through a page or three. Worth a read still, but hopefully the next book will see the author back at a faster pace.
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About the author

Erik Larson is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, most recently The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, which examines how Winston Churchill and his “Secret Circle” went about surviving the German air campaign of 1940-41. Larson’s The Devil in the White City is set to be a Hulu limited series; his In the Garden of Beasts is under option by Tom Hanks for a feature film. He recently published an audio-original ghost story, No One Goes Alone, which has been optioned by Chernin Entertainment, in association with Netflix. His Thunderstruck has been optioned by Sony Pictures Television for a limited TV series. Larson lives in Manhattan with his wife, who is a writer and retired neonatologist; they have three grown daughters.

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