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RMS Titanic: Gilded Lives On A Fatal Voyage (2012)

by Hugh Brewster(Favorite Author)

3.8 of 5 Votes: 3

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Collins

review 1: As an avid Titanic buff, who owns shelves upon shelves of books on this topic, I have high expectations for anything written about the disaster. And I can say with full conviction that I was not the least bit disappointed in Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage! This book was extraordinary in so many ways...As a Titanic buff, who owns shelves upon shelves of book on the topic, I knew the centennial of the sinking would mean scores of new tomes on the ill-fated liner (and a new bookshelf would definitely be a necessity!), but I, like others I am sure, wondered how these new works were going to approach a 100-year-old disaster that has already been the subject of countless books. You can easily spout off that it has all been covered. And let's face it: writers today needed a new a... morepproach since they don't have access to the same resources as past writers. Survivors for example. Millvina Dean was the last survivor of the tragedy, and she passed away in 2009. She was also only a few weeks old in 1912, so much of her contribution to the narrative of Titanic was second-hand anyway. And, as a personal aside: I firmly believe the best work on the disaster is still Walter Lord's 1955 book, A Night to Remember. His was the first scientific and thorough approach to those terrifying hours in the north Atlantic, and aside from having access to the most survivors -- when he started researching the book in the 1930s - 1940s, many of the ship's survivors were still alive -- his final product is one of the first holistic approaches to the disaster. There is a reason why A Night to Remember is considered the Bible of the Titanic tragedy.All that said, I was anxious to see how these centennial works were going to approach Titanic, and I was very excited to learn that many of them were focusing more on the people on board. The night of April 14-15, 1912 became a backdrop for the lives of the passengers and crew, and, in the case of the survivors, a turning point for their futures. And I am most fascinated with the people on board, so I greedily consumed every new book on the topic I could get my hands on. However, with a few exceptions -- John Welshman's The Last Night of a Small Town and Andrew Wilson's The Shadow of the Titanic are excellent -- I was disappointed in some of these newer works. They read like encyclopedias. If I wanted a Wikipedia overview of these people, I would look them up on ... yeah. But Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage was a breath of fresh air. Not only did Brewster bring these people to life for the 280+ pages of the book, but he plunked you down right in the midst of the Gilded Age, and contextualized these people in their own environment. So many works on Titanic write about the disaster in a vacuum, with little to no social and cultural context. And, therefore, it is so easy to look back on the Titanic disaster with late 20th century - early 21st century eyes and wonder why people behaved as they did. Why did it take the ship's bow disappearing beneath the water and the slant of the deck reaching 20 degrees before the passengers realized something was truly wrong? Why were the men who survived, especially 1st class passengers, so vilified? Brewster doesn't necessarily answer these questions, but he makes the world in which Titanic sailed that much more real, and helps you come to your own conclusions. The passengers believed in the invincibility of technology -- many of the male passengers knew the ship was sinking, but staunchly believed it would stay afloat long enough for help to arrive -- and in a world that worshipped heroism, the stories of those male passengers who bravely escorted their wives and children to the lifeboats and then stepped back to "await their fate" captured the world's imagination in the days after the sinking. Those who did not die such a noble death were cowards. It is interesting to note however what one passenger stated with true vitriol during the subsequent inquiries: if the male passengers had known the ship was going to sink, these stories of heroism would have been pure fantasy since they would have thrown themselves into the lifeboats from the beginning.And the people themselves. Brewster's real gift in this work is the attention he pays to the passengers. You close the book feeling like you really know champion tennis player Norris Williams, writer Edith Rosenbaum, President Taft's military aide Archie Butt, author Jacques Futrelle, and artist (and possibly Archie Butt's lover), Frank Millet. For those of us who have come to cherish these names as we have read the Titanic disaster over and over again, it is great to finally get to know them as people a little better.
review 2: This was an interesting book. I picked it up because like many people, I wanted to know more about the event of this great ship sinking and I recognized it as an event that brought an end to an age. The author introduces many of the First Class passengers and tells us of their lives in detail, and in some cases, too much so. I know so much about Archie Butt. Still, it is a nice glimpse into an age long past, and shows through both hard evidence and theory based on evidence the connections and types of relationships had by the first class passengers that connected many of them, reasserting for me that they did live in a small world in comparison with the rest of the population. More than relationships though, we get to learn about fashions and about how the sexual orientation of some men was in question then, and the legal repercussions that could have been taken against them, as homosexuality was outlawed then. Some may complain about that part of the book, but I think it is important to know just how underground the gay society had to be, and how the Bohemian lifestyle worked with those in the upper crust, and the homosexuals of the upper crust. It just gives us a better idea of what life was like then. Some chapters were hard to read because the author seemed to go on unrelated tirades in the middle of a paragraph, but they all wind back to being related to the original subject. Some chapters are hard to read just because of the sheer volume of the tragedy that occurred. After reading the chapters on the aftermath of the event, I was left feeling depressed and even had some very haunting dreams. Because of that, I do not recommend reading this book right before you go to bed. Over all, I was impressed with the depth that the author went to to tell us of what happened to the passengers and survivors, even to the ends of their lives. I was appalled by the accounts of the complete dickery and incompetence that happened on the life boats. Still this will be a great read if you want to know more about what happened to that ship. I highly recommend it, though I will say that it was missing something. It lacked something that made me feel slightly unfulfilled after I was done, so it only gets 4 stars. less

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