Titanic: The Last Great Images [Hardcover]

Robert D. Ballard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2, 2008

Dead men tell no tales. Dead ships, however, do.

Over seventy years after the great ocean liner sank, marine geologist Robert Ballard discovered the wreck of the Titanic 12,500 feet beneath the surface of the icy North Atlantic. Now Ballard presents the world with an opportunity to live the story of the famous ship through his amazing last great images, before Titanic’s remains are gone forever. This is a story told in rusted, twisted metal and debris, but it is also a human story told in a porcelain doll’s face, an empty shoe, and an abandoned derby hat.

Titanic: The Last Great Images maps the wreck of the ship from a variety of perspectives to give a completely new picture of the triumph and tragedy that was Titanic. This illustrated volume—and a National Geographic special—weave the strands of the ocean liner’s story together in renderings done by the ship’s original designers, charts of the debris field, and period illustrations. Robert Ballard provides the clearest, most accurate view of the ship we have ever seen. In crisply detailed underwater photography, disintegrating ruins and shattered pieces reveal pride of workmanship, a rigidly defined class system, and indelible images of terror and courage. This book shows what makes the Titanic worthy of the world’s undying fascination.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Nearly twenty years after his famous 1985 discovery of the shipwrecked Titantic, the remote viewing technology developed by oceanographer Ballard and his team had progressed such that Ballard could capture the dream he was "just starting to realize" in '85, deep-sea remote viewing with the "cleanest, clearest images... all in high definition." Despite (or because of) decay and ghostly lighting, the submarine images are strangely vivid and colorful, with the power and credence to support one of Ballard's major endeavors, declaring the wreck site an international marine museum (one chapter documents damage caused by private expeditions since '86, another imagines a visit to the museum of 2062). Chapters on the ship's construction and sinking include historical photos of the Titanic and its sister ship, the Olympic, juxtaposed with those same features from their Atlantic grave. Accompanied by commentary from colleagues Dwight Coleman and Jeremy Weirich, this book is a satisfying read with mesmerizing images for armchair voyagers, and a significant excursion into submarine technology and archeology for the more science-minded.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Ballard, a marine geologist, discovered the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic in 1985 and has penned a number of popular books about his search for the ship, among them, The Discovery of the Titanic (1987). Here he revisits the wreck in text and photos, maintaining that memories of the tragedy are fading away as the last survivors die and that the wreck itself has been badly damaged by salvagers. He not only attempts to re-create the splendor of the original ship and the time it sailed but also account for the factors that led to the ship’s sinking. The book is filled with Ballard’s color photographs, along with black-and-white photos and illustrations done in color. The black-and-white photos include images of survivors, passengers who died, sailors pulling bodies from the water, an embalmer at work, and the ship standing ready for launching. A haunting tribute to the tragedy of the sinking of the Titanic. --George Cohen

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Running Press (September 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0762435046
• ISBN-13: 978-0762435043
• Product Dimensions: 12 x 11.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #349,824 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #30 in Books > Professional & Technical > Transportation > Ships > Pictorial

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Maybe the "Last" images- but not so great, April 4, 2009

By 

Stanwyck "Stanwyck" (Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Titanic: The Last Great Images (Hardcover)

I bought this book expecting to find high quality, razor sharp pictures of Titanic, and instead got one full of enlarged video frames- complete with scan lines. In fact,at first I thought that they might be 3D images because they appeared to be double printed in different colors.

The content of the book is good- but there are a lot of archival images- meaning shots of the liner before she sank- a number of her sister, Olympic, and pictures of those aboard.

The book is fine for someone buying their first one about Titanic, but to those of us that have been fascinated by her for years, there is little new here.

Ballard does make a good case about how visitors are destroying the ship in different ways, but most of us knew that already.

One gripe I have about ALL the Ballard books. I really don't care about his submarines, his research ships, or his Rovers. Almost every book he writes has at least one chapter about the equipment he used. If he thinks that everyone is so interested in this subject, perhaps he should write a book just concerning that. If I buy a book about the World Series, I don't really care what kind of bus the players rode to the game, or what kind of cameras everyone used to photograph it.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting Photos of the Ship of Ghosts, August 26, 2008

By 

Bruce Trinque (Amston, CT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Titanic: The Last Great Images (Hardcover)

Robert Ballard, the author of "Titanic: The Last Great Images", will ever be associated with the great, lost ship. It was Ballard who was the driving force behind the 1985 expedition that found the sunken vessel, and since then his voice has been steady in its opposition to the destructive exploitation of the wreck.

"Titanic: The Last Great Images" serves in part as an account of his 2004 return to the site to make further explorations with Remotely Operated Vehicles equipped with high resolution television cameras. Many of the photographs in the book -- "the last great images" -- stem from that mission. They are intensely powerful images, documenting in extraordinary detail the present condition of the wreck. Ballard is sharply, although not stridently, critical of damage done over the previous two decades by other expeditions, perhaps more the result of accidents rather than deliberate intent, but destructive nonetheless. The damage is worst in those areas most frequently visited by such expeditions, but Ballard is quick to point out that even natural processes, left to themselves, will eventually reduce the wreck to a pile of unrecognizable debris (hence, I suppose, the notion of these images being "the last"), perhaps in a century's time. But Ballard does not merely report woe; he notes that the extent of damage is not as great as some have claimed and that the reduced pace of visiting expeditions has meant less damage being inflicted. Ballard's great hope, firmly expressed in this book, is that legal action will be undertaken to protect the wreck from human activity, and that steps might eventually be made towards preserving it from extensive natural decay, so that someday it might serve as an underwater marine museum, visited only through the medium of robot vehicles. It is a great dream.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Titanic images, September 30, 2008

By 

Mr. C. W. Hargreaves (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Titanic: The Last Great Images (Hardcover)

If you are a Titanic junkie like myself, you'll find this latest book from Robert Ballard, finder of Titanic, to be essential. New and haunting images from the debris feild and decaying wreck never fail to stir the emotions. A definite must have.