This is a good, solid, interesting, popular history book. It isn’t ground-breaking or particularly original, and it didn’t change my life or massively alter my outlook on anything, but I enjoyed it from start to finish and I guess I learnt something.
It’s the story of the captains of the two ships nearest to the Titanic when it struck an iceberg and began to sink. One of these captains, Captain Rostron of the Carpathia, mobilised all possible resources to steam as fast as possible (through an ice field) to the location of the stricken ship. The other captain, the infamous Stanley Lord, Master of the Californian, bizarrely and inexplicably ignored the Titanic’s distress signals and stayed put. He was closer to the Titanic than his counterpart on the Carpathia, and his inaction may have cost hundreds of lives.
The book acknowledges that Titanic’s Captain caused the disaster by failing to slow down and post extra look-outs as the ship headed into the ice-field, but the action focuses mainly on what happened after the Titanic struck the iceberg, when the captain of the Californian did nothing to prevent so many people from drowning in the freezing North Atlantic Ocean.
The narrator has a good voice and style, but I am getting a bit tired of professional narrators who make countless pronunciation errors. You would think that this sort of thing would be routinely checked and corrected. I know it’s pedantic, bit I do find it distracting when the narrative is punctuated by frequent mispronunciations.