New York Times bestselling author Caitlin Doughty presents Titanic like never before: through the stories of those who died – and what happened to the bodies.
In Dead in the Water, internationally bestselling author and death expert Caitlin Doughty (author of From Here to Eternity) explains what actually happened to the 1,500 people who died the night of history’s most famous shipwreck. Alongside white-knuckle tales of survival and mass death during the disaster, Doughty foregrounds the haunting stories of lesser-known victims, profiles the telegraph-cable-repairmen-turned-seafaring-undertakers who pulled the floating bodies from the wreck site in the north Atlantic, and reveals how a salvage company came to control the human artifacts carried and worn by the dead passengers and crew. Along the way she shares the surprising science of death at sea and how the Titanic tragedy led to mass casualty protocols still used today. The first book of its kind on one of the most famous events in human history, Dead in the Water explores how we face the void and accept (or refuse to accept) death in extreme conditions.
In Dead in the Water, internationally bestselling author and death expert Caitlin Doughty (author of From Here to Eternity) explains what actually happened to the 1,500 people who died the night of history’s most famous shipwreck. Alongside white-knuckle tales of survival and mass death during the disaster, Doughty foregrounds the haunting stories of lesser-known victims, profiles the telegraph-cable-repairmen-turned-seafaring-undertakers who pulled the floating bodies from the wreck site in the north Atlantic, and reveals how a salvage company came to control the human artifacts carried and worn by the dead passengers and crew. Along the way she shares the surprising science of death at sea and how the Titanic tragedy led to mass casualty protocols still used today. The first book of its kind on one of the most famous events in human history, Dead in the Water explores how we face the void and accept (or refuse to accept) death in extreme conditions.
Reviews
This is the Titanic book I have been longing for. It's empathetic to its bones. While the Titanic mythos thrives on its mysticism and sensationalism, this is a stark, deeply human, chilling and curious meditation on the nature of death - both it's inevitably and how resistant we are to face it in the western world. I expected to pick up a book about the Titanic, but what lurks within these pages is a reflective and strangely comforting examination of what waits for us at the end.
Doughty has taken a subject as well known as any could be and somehow made it new. Dead in the Water tells the story of Titanic's dead with compassion, scrupulous care and an honourable dedication to understanding what it meant to die in the most famous shipwreck of all. As a reader, you can't help but be infected by her fascination, but also to learn its human lesson: that we are drawn to such stories of death as a way of reckoning with our own
The immediacy and the drama of Doughty's account brought me up short on the first page and never let up. Here are the people on the doomed ship as if we knew them. Here are the people who survived as if we were them. Doughty's prose is unstoppable and devastating. This book is a masterpiece of both scholarship and storytelling