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. 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. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger’s U-boat, but told no one. Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. 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. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone.

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.

“Both terrifying and enthralling.”- Entertainment Weekly

From the bestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania.

Dead wake erik larson review