Dead Wake

Autor: Larson, Erik

Editorial: Vintage

Lenguaje: Inglés Internacional

ISBN13: 9780307408860

Reseña: #1 New York Times Bestseller 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 eras 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 Schwiegers 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 dont 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.