Shadow of the Titanic: The Extraordinary Stories of Those Who Survived

From an acclaimed literary biographer, a riveting and groundbreaking account of what happened to the survivors of the Titanic.\n\nWe think we know the story of the Titanic-the once majestic and supposedly unsinkable ship that struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Britain to America-but very little has been written about the vessel's 705 survivors. How did the events of that horrific night in the icy waters of the North Atlantic affect the lives of those who lived to tell the tale? \n\nDrawing on a wealth of previously unpublished letters, memoirs, diaries, and interviews with their family members, award-winning journalist Andrew \n\nWilson brings to life the survivors' colorful voices, from the famous, like heiress Madeleine Astor, to the lesser known second-and third-class passengers, such as the Navratil brothers, who were traveling under assumed names because they were being abducted by their father. \n\nMore than one hundred years after that fateful voyage, Shadow of the Titanic adds an important new dimension to this enduringly captivating story.\n\nEditorial Reviews\n\nWilson's fresh angle convincingly explores the strain on survivors."\n\n- New York Times Book Review\n\n"This is a captivating read that begins where most other Titanic books end." \n\n-The Library Journal (Starred Review) \n\n"With this survival tale, Wilson has carved out a fascinating slice of the [Titanic] story."\n\n- USA Today\n\n"Andrew Wilson's eloquent chronicle of the dark side of survival offers fresh information, fascinating insights, and masterful storytelling. A spellbinding voyage into the uncharted depths of the Titanic tragedy." - Deborah Davis, author of Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X\n\n- From the Publisher\n\nThere's just no rowing away from the 1912 shipwreck's tragic backwash in this melodramatic biographical sketchbook. Journalist Wilson (Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith) surveys Titanic survivors' after-stories and chalks up everything he can--suicides, accidental deaths, public disgraces, divorces, remarriages, frigid failures to marry, feelings of angst, embracings of life--to the disaster's legacy. He sometimes visits steerage but focuses on flamboyant first-class passengers like White Star Lines chairman Bruce Ismay, who was pilloried for not going down with the ship; an Astor widow who pursued a scandalous, violent relationship with a much-younger Italian boxer; and unsinkable fashionista Lady Duff Gordon, who shrugged off allegations that she voted against returning in the lifeboat to rescue floundering victims. The author unconvincingly manufactures Freudian complexes for his subjects to psychoanalytically link their every subsequent dysfunction and misfortune to the fatal iceberg. ("The guilt that came with surviving the Titanic...lay heavy upon her heart until finally it could stand it no longer," he theorizes when movie star-survivor Dorothy Gibson succumbs to high blood pressure and coronary failure thirty-two years after the sinking.) Wilson gives a gripping account of the shipwreck proper, but the long denouement feels like a trumped-up soap opera. Agent: Clare Alexander. (Mar. 6)\n- Publishers Weekly\n\nWilson (Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith) offers engaging portraits of the survivors of the world's best-known shipwreck and how they lived with (or repressed) their memories of the event. For some, survival inspired a carpe diem spirit and a determination to live life to the fullest; for others, it brought on nervous breakdowns and social ostracism, particularly for the men who escaped in lifeboats. The most poignant stories are those of the survivors who were plagued by additional tragedies, who died young or committed suicide. Conversely, the longest-lived survivors became beloved symbolic figures of minor celebrity. VERDICT The author makes good use of archival and published sources and his own recently conducted interviews. This is a captivating read that begins where most other Titanic books end. (Illustrations not seen.) [See Prepub Alert, 9/22/11.]\n- Library Journal\n\nA biographer joins others writers swimming in the centennial vortex of the Titanic, which sank on Apr. 14, 1912. Wilson (Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex, 2007, etc.) begins with the screams of the dying and ends with the sigh of the last survivor, Millvina Dean (just three months old on the night to remember), who died at 97 in 2009. In between he tells the stories of some of the 705 survivors--from the well known (like White Star Line managing director Bruce Ismay) to those unknown, except to Titanic scholars. Ismay's controversial story, told more fully in Frances Wilson's How to Survive the Titanic (2011), sits in the middle of the text, surrounded by those who, for the most part, survived in more conventional, socially acceptable ways: They were women, children, necessary crew members--or just plain lucky. Among the latter: teenager Jack Thayer, who leaped from the sinking vessel and somehow found a rescue craft, went on to write a memoir but took his own life in 1945. Wilson tells some other survivors' stories in considerable detail, including that of Madeleine Force Astor, whose wealthy husband died that night; of some honeymooners; of Lady Duff Gordon, whose co-survivors in a virtually empty lifeboat declined the chance to pick up others in the icy water; of silent-film star Dorothy Gibson, featured in the first movie based on the disaster, Saved from the Titanic, which appeared just four weeks afterward. The author has kind words for Walter Lord, whose 1955 A Night to Remember started a second wave of interest. Wilson's storytelling skills are up to the task, but his psychological ones sometimes send him off into the land of stretched analogies--as when he observes that Lady Duff's stained kimono represents her stained character. Disasters change people. Wilson counts the ways, often effectively and affectingly.\n- Kirkus Reviews