On May 7, 1915, toward the end of her 101st eastbound crossing, from New York to Liverpool, England, R.M.S. Lusitania -- pride of the Cunard Line and one of the greatest ocean liners afloat -- became the target of a terrifying new weapon and a casualty of a terrible new kind of war. Sunk off the southern coast of Ireland by a torpedo fired from the German submarine U-20, she exploded and sank in eighteen minutes, taking with her some twelve hundred people, more than half of the passengers and crew. Cold-blooded, deliberate, and unprecedented in the annals of war, the sinking of the Lusitania shocked the world. It also jolted the United States out of its neutrality -- 128 Americans were among the dead -- and hastened the nation's entry into World War I.In her account of this enormous and controversial tragedy, Diana Preston recalls both a pivotal moment in history and a remarkable human drama. The story of the Lusitania is a window on the maritime world of the early twentieth century: the heyday of the luxury liner, the first days of the modern submarine, and the climax of the decades-long German-British rivalry for supremacy of the Atlantic. It is a criticalchapter in the progress of World War I and in the political biographies of Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan, Kaiser Wilhelm II, andFirst Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. Above all, it is the story of the passengers and crew on that fateful voyage -- a story of terror and cowardice, of self-sacrifice and heroism, of death and miraculous survival.
Publishers Weekly,Following her previous title for Walker, The Boxer Rebellion, Preston, an Oxford-trained historian, writer and broadcaster, provides more thrills and chills with this tale of the May 1915 sinking of the Lusitania, one of the jewels of Cunard's fleet of ocean liners, during a crossing from New York to Liverpool. Hit by a German submarine's torpedo, it sank in 18 minutes, with 1,200 casualties. The tragedy was a major motivation for America's entering WWI against Germany, as 124 U.S. citizens were among the dead. Preston offers myriad details to recreate the look and feel of the Lusitania's last voyage. Beyond that, she judiciously marshals German accounts at the time of the sinking and since to "justify" the attack, such as the charge that the Lusitania was carrying Canadian soldiers or contraband weapons, but she finds no evidence that soldiers were present, although a cache of weapons was carried. With a realistic view of the tangle of world politics in the WWI era, she concludes: "... no government, British, German, or American, was entirely free of blame for the situation leading up to the attack. Nor, in its wake, was any government hesitant to twist the facts, or use the disaster, to its own political ends." (May) Forecast: With human details to back up the political analysis, this fluently written item would seem a natural for history buffs. Analogies between the WTC attacks and the ill-fated ship may be drawn by some reviewers. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
