Shadow of the Titanic
The Extraordinary Stories of Those Who Survived
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- USD 15.99
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- USD 15.99
Descripción editorial
A riveting and groundbreaking account of what happened to the survivors of the Titanic.
We think we know the story of the Titanic—the once majestic and supposedly unsinkable ship that struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Britain to America—but very little has been written about the vessel’s 705 survivors. How did the events of that horrific night in the icy waters of the North Atlantic affect the lives of those who lived to tell the tale?
Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished letters, memoirs, diaries, and interviews with their family members, award-winning journalist Andrew Wilson brings to life the survivors’ colorful voices, from the famous, like heiress Madeleine Astor, to the lesser known second-and third-class passengers, such as the Navratil brothers, who were traveling under assumed names because they were being abducted by their father.
More than one hundred years after that fateful voyage, Shadow of the Titanic adds an important new dimension to this enduringly captivating story.
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There's just no rowing away from the 1912 shipwreck's tragic backwash in this melodramatic biographical sketchbook. Journalist Wilson (Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith) surveys Titanic survivors' after-stories and chalks up everything he can suicides, accidental deaths, public disgraces, divorces, remarriages, frigid failures to marry, feelings of angst, embracings of life to the disaster's legacy. He sometimes visits steerage but focuses on flamboyant first-class passengers like White Star Lines chairman Bruce Ismay, who was pilloried for not going down with the ship; an Astor widow who pursued a scandalous, violent relationship with a much-younger Italian boxer; and unsinkable fashionista Lady Duff Gordon, who shrugged off allegations that she voted against returning in the lifeboat to rescue floundering victims. The author unconvincingly manufactures Freudian complexes for his subjects to psychoanalytically link their every subsequent dysfunction and misfortune to the fatal iceberg. ("The guilt that came with surviving the Titanic lay heavy upon her heart until finally it could stand it no longer," he theorizes when movie star-survivor Dorothy Gibson succumbs to high blood pressure and coronary failure thirty-two years after the sinking.) Wilson gives a gripping account of the shipwreck proper, but the long denouement feels like a trumped-up soap opera.
