Truly a story of senseless murder on the high seas. Recommended to history lovers who enjoy blow by blow accounts that place a human face on distant events. A full picture is painted and a deeper understanding of life in the WWI years is made deftly available to the reader. The book skillfully blends the cold dispassionate stories of U-boat attacks and the use of chemical weapons contrasted with the blind trust of the passengers of the Lusitania traveling into a war zone and the manipulative nature of the Admiralty and Room 40 trying to draw America into the war. I think Brick did a great job with the narration. A harrowing, engaging and throughly shocking story that kept me hanging on each word. This amazing book offers a 360 degree birds-eye view of the history of these WWI events from multiple perspectives. Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster that helped place America on the road to war. Full of glamour, mystery, and real-life suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope Riddle to President Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love. 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 ways 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. He knew, moreover, that his ship-the fastest then in service-could outrun any threat. But the Lusitania was one of the era's great transatlantic 'Greyhounds', 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 had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone, and for months its U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. On May 1, 1915, 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. From the number-one New York Times best-selling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania, published to coincide with the one-hundredth anniversary of the disaster.

Dead wake larson