The Titanic: Disaster of the Century

By: Wyn Craig Wade

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

Length: 14 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

In this centennial edition of the definitive book on the Titanic, new findings and interviews shed light on the world’s most famous marine disaster for its 100th anniversary.

On that fatal night in 1912, the world’s largest moving object disappeared beneath the waters of the North Atlantic in less than three hours. Why was the ship sailing through waters well known to be a "mass of floating ice"? Why were there too few lifeboats? Why were a third of the survivors crew members? Based on the sensational evidence of the U.S. Senate hearings, eyewitness accounts, and the results of the 1985 Woods Hole expedition that photographed the ship, this electrifying account vividly re-creates the vessel’s last desperate hours afloat and fully addresses the questions that have continued to haunt the tragedy of the Titanic.

©2012 Wyn Craig Wade (P)2012 Tantor

Critic reviews

"A thorough, argumentative work." (John Updike, The New Yorker)

Very informative book

This book is more than the standard info about the Titanic. It centers on the investigation after the wreck and is very thorough and very interesting. I really enjoyed the listen although it could have been a little shorter without damaging the experience.

Fascinating Nuggets Imbedded Within Tedium

I wanted Titanic info, and this book has lots of stuff that I had never known. OTOH, the interesting info - of which there is much - is surrounded by long, uninteresting (to me) sections about the politicians conducting the subsequent investigations, and about the intrigues that surrounded them. To be sure, the politicians and companies and newspapers and survivors DID have their positions, which needed sorting out, and that is done nicely here.
But I wanted more about the ship and the sinking. To wit: I just watched a convincing TV doc describing a factor that I now am convinced did cause Titanic to sink more quickly than it otherwise would have - a factor which received extremely little mention in this book. (I am talking about the enormous heat from smoldering coal inside coal bunker No. 6, whose weakened wall allowed the sea to burst through where it otherwise would not have. Look it up.)
A worthy book, but not one I will run to tell others about.

Not what I expected

I got this book based on an interest in finding out more about the wreck itself and maybe a forensic breakdown down or more detailed breakdown of the events That transpired It seemed to me that there was a lot more emphasis on the politics of the day then there were any kind of technical or scientific analysis of Titanic.. I had to stop it and start it several times because it gets kind of dry in spots... All in all Very informative Just not what I thought I was getting myself into

Everything you did not know about Titanic.

Loved this accounts depth, details, and incredible descriptions of the most famous lost ship ever.

Very dry in places.

This book gets very long, dry and boating in places. It's like trying to read a collage thesis paper that has added personal accounts just to make the authors writing bearable.

Not what I thought and glad it wasn’t

This book is much more than a blow by blow of what happened during the Titanic’s maiden voyage. It tells the story of US Senate investigation so you get tons of information about what happened, but the author digs deeper into how the Titanic tragedy shattered the innocent naivety of the early 1900s that technology could save mankind from the perils and hardships of life. It is rich in history of that time period with Taft as the president of the United States and the friendship turned rivalry between Taft and Roosevelt. The last few chapters are so eloquently written and thought provoking that I haven’t completely processed it yet. There are times that the writer gets into the uncomfortable truths of humanity and how much we as a society still haven’t learned. I have a feeling that this will be an audiobook that I replay often and each time gain more information and insight on the Titanic.

The disaster and the disaster hearings

Wyn Craig Wade's "Titanic" is my third favorite account of the tragedy (the other two were written by Walter Lord). He describes the US Senate hearings into the disaster, held within days of the event, and combines that with powerful flashbacks of the sinking itself. For example, when he recounts the testimony of Fifth Officer Harold Lowe, who was actively involved in filling the lifeboats, Wade interweaves a number of anecdotes about the lifeboats, some of them episodes that Lowe himself could not have seen but which help to fill out the story and increase the sense of impending doom.

The chairman of the Senate hearings, William Alden Smith, has come in for considerable ridicule over the years for his sometimes repetitive and often obtuse questions. Wade draws a very different picture. Smith's admittedly idiosyncratic way of questioning witnesses was actually a well-honed skill, one that elicited a great deal of information that might have otherwise been missed. (Some of it was also the result of lousy acoustics and background noise, which forced Smith to ask the same question more than once.) Smith almost single-handedly wrote the committee's report and introduced it to the Senate with a masterful speech that very effectively summed up what was then known about the sinking.

Because of Smith's efforts, many details of the story that would otherwise have been lost became a matter of public record; and the legislation that followed went a long way toward improving the chances of future travelers to survive a similar disaster. It was Smith who zeroed in on the lack of adequate lifeboats, the perfunctory and inadequate lifeboat drills, the terrible risks Captain Smith was taking by sailing at top speed in waters that were known to be dangerous (and with no additional lookouts); Smith who brought out the facts about steerage passengers' ignorance of their real danger until it was too late, about the "laissez faire" attitude taken toward their ability to reach the boat deck, about the huge discrepancy in survival rates between the classes. It was Smith who exploded the myth of the "stiff upper lip" on the part of the cultured English gentlemen: true enough early in the night of the sinking before it was clear to everyone that the ship really was going down; after that it was every man for himself, regardless of class. (In other words, James Cameron's depiction of people's behavior during the sinking is much more accurate than that of either the 1953 film or the 1958 film version of Lord's book.)

The book was originally published about 25 years ago and has since been reissued with a new foreword and a new afterword, which are included in this audiobook.

Robertson Dean gives a wonderful reading of this deeply moving book. There's one exception to this, something I found distracting at times: Dean has a very deep, very North American voice, and his attempts at a variety of British accents are hit and miss. The accents themselves would be all over the map in the best of hands: testimony was taken from people of all social classes, and Dean tries to reflect that in his reading, but the results are only occasionally convincing. Even so, as I said, this remains one of my favorite books on the subject, and it's a great and brooding listen.

So much new information

This audiobook was great for anyone interested in diving deeper into the titanic tragedy. I gathered so much new information that answered many of my own questions about the incident!

Addicted

Love the book. I listen almost every day. I'm obsessed with the Titanic and all the stories from the tragedy.

Titanic

The iceberg that punctured the hull of the Titanic was merely the instrument of her sinking and not the cause; the great ship was struck down by hubris. She was too big, too fast, too grotesquely luxurious to survive. As in all horrific calamities, there was not a single cause, but many, and as fate pushed all the final pieces into place, there could be only one outcome.

Author Wyn Wade pins the perps squarely to the wall, exposing the greed and overarching hubris of all concerned in the design, construction, and operation of the grand ship. As one sage unwisely remarked at the outset of her doomed voyage, "Not even God Himself could sink this ship." Little else need be said.

Robertson Dean's narration is outstanding. His emulation of British accents that seemed to annoy some reviewers is a triviality.