Review: Larson, Dead Wake

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

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


[audiobook]
[library]

I'm kind of hit or miss with Erik Larson. I stopped reading The Devil in the White City halfway through and I'm currently reading Thunderstruck, which is not gripping me, but Dead Wake was fantastic. Possibly there's something about the structure of a shipwreck which suits his style: the bringing together by coincidence of widely disparate elements. So Larson can talk about the passengers (themselves wildly disparate), the crew, the Lusitania herself, the u-boat that sank her, the spies in England who were intercepting German communications. He can even talk about Woodrow Wilson and his attempts to avoid World War I. And it all DOES come together in one disaster.

I learned many things I did not know, including the fact that WWI u-boats had no way to see OUT, except for (a) the periscope and (b) the very small and generally shuttered windows in the conning tower. So a u-boat at cruising depth was literally blind. They steered by charts and dead reckoning, and I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.

The audiobook narrator was also excellent. Scott Brick is the guy who narrated In the Heart of the Sea, and I happily listened to him reading endnotes--which I don't think is the reason I approve of Dead Wake more than Larson's other books, but it doesn't hurt.



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