Customer Reviews

The Titanic Disaster: As Reported in the British National Press, April-July 1912

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This book is great reading, informative and historical. Since the author uses the actual headlines and articles from the newspapers of 1912 you can't help but feel you are traveling through time. The accounts of survivors are heart wrenching and the survivors of those lost, even more so. The inquiries are most interesting and politics never change, do they? I love this book!

Many books have been written on the Titanic. Most of them describe the event like an historical fact, with the advance knowledge of the events and its outcome. Nevertheless, few describe to the emotions and the opinion of the people who lived those moments and how they were observed by the public. Through journalistic notes of the British press, the author of this book, Dave Bryceson, presents a compilation of the news about the wreck and the events that followed it(the rescue, the trials, the support collects for the victims). This it is an excellent book that makes you feel the disaster in all detail, in the human perspective provided by the newspapers. Definitively a book that must be in the collection of every Titanic fan.

Dave Bryceson's (1997) book is the culmination of years of painstaking research and what is, for the author, an enduring fascination for the impact of this great maritime disaster not only upon the lives of those who perished and their relatives, but also the great sense of public participation in the private grief of those affected by it.

Just very occassionally, in more modern times, a great human catastrophe affects a whole nation or group of nations. Not so much because of the number of people killed or injured, but for reasons that are more subtle than that.

'The Titanic Disaster' captures the effect upon ordinary people of this enormous public tragedy, through a collection of press reports, announcements and published photographs which followed the events of 14th and 15th April 1912.

To us the Titanic, great as it is, is an old story. We know who lived and who died. We know who was a hero and who a coward. Much is still unclear, but the basic facts are known. The wonder of this book is that it takes us back to 1912, a time when it was not known who had survived, or how, or even if an accident had happened at all. As the pages unfold, the true horror and magnitude of the disaster becomes evident. The reader feels as if he is back in 1912, learning all for the first time. The feelings created may be close to those produced early on Sept 11, when we heard planes had crashed into the towers, or to the day when we first learned shots had been fired in Dallas. In short this book turns the old story of the Titanic into a new story, something few other books can do. So while it does not contain as many facts and figures as other books may, all Titanic buffs are encouraged to get a copy for their library.