Pier 54 on the Hudson River in Manhattan is padlocked and forgotten now. Like whispers of the past, the engraved names of the shipping companies Cunard and White Star remain barely legible atop its rusted iron gate. Few of the present-day joggers and cyclists who pass by might recall that a century ago, on May 1, 1915, the Lusitania set sail from this berth on her last doomed voyage.
Erik Larson is here to remind us. In his gripping new examination of the last days of what was then the fastest cruise ship in the world, Larson (Devil in the White City, In the Garden of Beasts) brings the past stingingly alive. A total of 1,198 people, including 123 Americans, were lost when a German U-Boat sank the Lusitania off Ireland's west coast. And in a larger sense, the disaster could be said to have cost thousands of additional casualties in collateral damage: Anguish over the sinking, and anger at German perfidy, eventually helped prod the determinedly neutral President Woodrow Wilson to bring the United States into World War I.
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