It was a small but convivial gathering last Saturday at Glenn's. Eschewing our usual weeknight dinner, Glenn treated us to lunch al fresco and used the Cunard Line's menu from 1908 as his inspiration. With duck pate, anchovies, stilton cheese, mixed nuts, and smoked salmon for appetizers, Glenn followed with roast beef and browned potatoes for the entrée and apple pie for dessert. As we ate in Glenn's beautifully-restored 100-year old barn, we couldn't help but think of the Lusitania's passengers, dining on the same food at the very moment their ship was struck by a German torpedo.
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| Glenn's copy of the Lusitania's 1908 lunch menu |
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| Dining with Captain Glenn |
Our Review and Discussion of Dead Wake by Erik Larson
Although not as infamous as the Titanic's sinking, Germany's 1915 attack on the Lusitania is known by every student of history as an important reason American sentiment began to shift away from isolationism and in support of the Allied Powers against Germany. With that as background to our discussion, Tom answered our most pressing question in the affirmative. Yes, despite the book's obvious climax, Dead Wake keeps its reader in suspense throughout.
Like most books we've read, it's strength of story that wins us over. And that's where Larson's book shines, with an account both informative and gripping. We learned that Cunard's Lusitania and Mauretania were thought to be unsinkable. As the fastest ocean liners in the world, they operated at twice the speed of Germany's fastest U-boats. So why was the Lusitania vulnerable? It was traveling at reduced speed to save Cunard money; its hull was lined with empty coal bunkers which, when filled with sea water after the torpedo explosion, forced the ship to list precipitously; and, most damningly, the English (who'd broken the German Navy's code) knew of the U-boat's presence but refused to alert or escort the Lusitania for fear of compromising their codebreakers or risking their destroyers.
Our admiration for story notwithstanding, Glenn's biggest quibble was ours as well: for a sinking that took only 18 minutes, the reader is fed an awful lot of detail, especially about passengers more colorful than significant, in the course of the book's 353 pages. (That said, who wouldn't want to know about the passenger who survived being ejected from an underwater smokestack? Or the passenger torn between saving his original sketches by William Thackeray or his copy of A Christmas Carol with handwritten annotations by Charles Dickens?)
Our Rating of Dead Wake
Our enjoyment of a good story was tempered by the sobering statistics we learned while reading Dead Wake. Although the ship sank in calm weather, with ample lifeboats and within sight of the Irish shore, almost 1,200 of its 2,000 passengers died. Fearing more U-boat attacks, the British Navy ordered its nearby cruiser to withdraw, so a flotilla of fishing trawlers and civilian boats was all that was available to perform search and rescue. The Lusitania was prized as a target, not because of its military importance, but because U-boat captains were recognized for the tonnage of their kills. As one of the largest vessels afloat, the Lusitania was an irresistible trophy.
Recognizing a good story, but one weighed down by an excess of detail, we gave Larson a solid 7.4.
Next Up: Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides
Dean gave us an interesting list of contemporary classics (Where the Crawdads Sing, Beloved, A Visit from the Goon Squad) plus the controversial American Dirt. The voting was close, but we rejected all of them in favor of Hellhound on His Trail, Hampton Sides' account of James Earl Ray's assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the manhunt that consumed a nation.
