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

#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

Author: Erik Larson
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
Published: 03/10/2015
Pages: 448
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.49lbs
Size: 9.36h x 6.94w x 1.41d
ISBN: 9780307408860

Accelerated Reader:
Reading Level: 8.6
Point Value: 20
Interest Level: Upper Grade
Quiz #/Name: 185200 / Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

Award: ALA Notable Books - Winner

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 10/01/2014 pg. 62
Kirkus Reviews 12/01/2014
Publishers Weekly 01/05/2015
Booklist 01/01/2015 pg. 33
Entertainment Weekly 12/26/2014 pg. 89
Library Journal 02/01/2015 pg. 92
BookPage 03/01/2015
People Weekly 03/30/2015 pg. 50
Shelf Awareness 03/10/2015
New York Times Book Review 03/08/2015 pg. 1
New York Times Book Review 03/15/2015 pg. 26
Entertainment Weekly 03/13/2015 pg. 58
New Yorker (The) 03/30/2015 pg. 74
Kirkus Best Nonfiction 12/01/2015 pg. 28
Library Journal 10/01/2014

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.