I can clearly recall some source or another praising Cameron for his three-part approach to his subject: in the first part, the audience is made to fall in love with the ship in the second, the audience is made to fall in love with the characters in the last, the audience is spellbound as the ship meets destruction. Despite the inherent risks of cliché in drawing comparisons between a fictional movie about the Titanic tragedy and a nonfiction book about the Lusitania disaster, I could not mentally resist the similes between James Cameron’s epic film and Larson’s latest book. Just in time for the centennial, Erik Larson seeks to redress that with Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania. Today, most people know a great deal more about Titanic - a similar behemoth liner that met catastrophe just three years earlier and has been famously celebrated by multiple books and films - than they do about the doomed Lusitania.

Millions died on both sides in the interim.

Many recall the sinking of the Lusitania as the reason the United States entered the war, but that is not entirely true: an outraged but stubbornly neutral America did not declare war on Germany for another two years. The unprovoked sinking of a passenger liner full of civilians only upped the ante of total war. This was a clear violation of international law and norms, but although the Great War had only been in progress for some ten months, Imperial Germany had already demonstrated that it would not be bound by such constraints: German violation of Belgian neutrality accompanied by widespread civilian atrocities was followed by an unprecedented aerial bombing of cities using both zeppelins and airplanes, and then the deployment of poison gas. One hundred years ago - on without warning a German submarine deliberately targeted and torpedoed the massive British passenger liner Lusitania en route from New York to Liverpool, which went down in minutes with a loss of nearly 1200 lives, including 121 Americans.

Deadwake