A Night of Ice and Stars

On the night of 14 April 1912, on a flat-calm, moonless sea, the largest and most luxurious ship in the world brushed an iceberg for perhaps ten seconds — and two hours and forty minutes later she was gone, taking some fifteen hundred people with her into water two degrees below freezing. The Titanic had lifeboats for barely half the souls aboard, and she was four days into her maiden voyage.

Here is the whole story, told from the keel up: the dinner-table bargain in a Belfast magnate's London mansion that conceived her; the three thousand men who built her under the great gantry at Harland & Wolff; the millionaires, emigrants, stokers, bandsmen, and wireless boys who sailed in her; the seven ice warnings that went unheeded; the minute-by-minute catastrophe of the sinking and the arithmetic of who lived and who died; the ship that watched from ten miles away and did nothing; the inquiries, the scapegoats, and the reforms that still govern every ship at sea; and the long afterlife — the myths, the movies, the 1985 discovery two and a half miles down, the salvage wars, and the rusting bow now slowly dissolving into the Atlantic.

Drawing on survivor testimony from both 1912 inquiries, the memoirs of those who lived the night, and a century of wreck science, this is the Titanic told whole: neither romance nor autopsy, but the gripping human truth of the ship that became the modern world's memento mori.