Download Erik Larson's Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania Summary AudioBook Free
This is a summary of Erik Larson's New York Times best-seller Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania On May 1, 1915, with WWI going into its 10th month, a luxury sea liner as richly appointed as an British country house sailed out of NY, destined for Liverpool, carrying a record amount of children and newborns. The people were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had announced the seas around Britain to be always a war area. For weeks, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. However the Lusitania was one of the era's great transatlantic "Greyhounds" - the speediest liner then operating - and her captain, William Thomas Turner, positioned tremendous beliefs in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had retained civilian boats safe from harm. Germany, however, was determined to change the guidelines of the overall game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. In the mean time, an ultra-secret United kingdom intelligence unit monitored Schwieger's U-boat, but informed no-one. As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward Liverpool, a range of causes both grand and achingly small - hubris, a chance fog, a closely guarded secret, plus more - all converged to produce one of the fantastic disasters of record. It is a story that many folks think we realize but don't, and Erik Larson says it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger family portrait of America at the level of the Progressive Period. Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings alive a solid of evocative character types, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering feminine architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening battle but also captivated by the chance of new love. Gripping and important, Useless Wake catches the sheer crisis and emotional vitality of a tragedy whose intimate details and true interpretation have long been obscured by record.
