Titanic Tomes

from Shelf Awareness

April 15, a week from next Sunday, is the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.

Already the wave of commemorations has begun, marked by the launch this week of the 3D version of James Cameron's blockbuster movie, which set records when it appeared in 1997 in mere 2D, including 15 weeks in a row at #1 and 11 Oscars. As if that's not enough, there's a new four-part ABC miniseries, Titanic, from the writer of Downton Abbey, and Titanic: Blood and Steel, a 12-part series focusing on the construction and sinking of the Titanic.

Dating back to 1912, the Titanic tragedy has inspired a fleet of books. The best known is A Night to Remember by Walter Lord, the basis for the 1958 film. A century after the tragic sinking, books about it continue to appear. 

Here is a selected roundup of new Titanic tomes:

• The Titanic for Dummies by Stephen Spignesi.
• Build Your Own Titanic, a paperback out of which the "reader" can build a 1:200 cardboard scale model of the ill-fated ship.
• Titanic: The Tragedy That Shook the World by the editors of LIFE Books.
• Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From by Richard Davenport-Hines.
• Titanic Tragedy: A New Look at the Lost Liner by John Maxtone-Graham.
• A Rare Titanic Family: The Caldwells' Story of Survival by Julie Hedgepeth Williams, the story of a couple with a three-year-old son who all survived the Titanic's sinking, written by their great-niece, a historian.
• The Watch That Ends the Night: Voices from the Titanic by Allan Wolf.
• Titanic: Voices from the Disaster by Deborah Hopkinson.
• Voices from the Titanic: The Epic Story of the Tragedy from the People Who Were There by Geoff Tibballs.
• Kaspar the Titanic Cat by Michael Morpurgo, a middle-grade tale of a four-legged passenger.

There are many more. These are--forgive us--just the tip of the iceberg. --John Mutter


While over at The Daily Beast:
12 Things You don;t Know about James Cameron's "Titanic"


And at Art Daily News:

Winding House museum in New Tredegar, southern Wales remembers its connection to Titanic sinking

April 16, 1912 front page coverage of the Titanic disaster. AP Photo/The New York Times. By: Robert Barr, Associated Press LONDON (AP).- — As the Titanic was sinking in the North Atlantic, its more than 2,000 passengers and crew scrambling in the dark for lifeboats, a young man far away in Wales heard the ship's distress calls on his homemade radio. Arthur "Artie" Moore, one of the few people on Earth following the developing disaster, could do nothing to help, and encountered disbelief when he reported the news to his local police station. Although some people believed that Moore had heard the signals, "the fact that the Titanic had sunk, no one would believe that because the Titanic was unsinkable," said Stuart Instone, a member of a local radio club based in the old mill where Moore monitored radio traffic as the ship sank on the night of April 14-15, 1912. Moore's achievement, which sparked a career in the electronics industry, is being celebrated in the Welsh valleys on the centenary ... More