Titanic

September 15, 2011

The 100th anniversary in 2012 of the sinking of Titanic is bringing about a surfeit of books on the subject, and this contribution fills a particular niche. Hines ("I Remember Laura": Laura Ingalls Wilder) reprints the coverage of the disaster by the London Daily Telegraph, the largest circulating newspaper of the time, and adds his own commentary. The results are useful as a gathering of source material (much like the published transcripts of the official U.S. and UK inquires into the sinking) but not completely successful as an examination of contemporary news reporting as suggested in the book's promotional material ("Read how a paper and the world struggled to find and report the truth"). Hines makes the obligatory reference to news being different "before television and Twitter" and notes generally how reporters sometimes fabricated details when none was available. VERDICT The author, in his notes, tut-tuts about the hubris of the ship's owner and builders and of the idea of man conquering nature with an "unsinkable" ship (as all books about Titanic seem to do), but he is good at explaining differences between what was reported in the newspaper articles and what actually happened. Best for Titanic buffs, not necessarily for the general reader.--Megan Hahn Fraser, Univ. of California-Los Angeles Lib.

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