Posted by Don Morlan on July 30, 1998 at 10:59:45 in inet-gw.data-io.com:
In Reply to: Re: Titanic Book posted by Loren Perry on July 29, 1998 at 20:20:00:
: Walter Lord's book A Night To Remember is regarded
: by many as the finest written document concerning
: the events of April 14-15, 1912 ever produced.
: Probably the only major inaccuracy concerns the
: final stages of the ship's sinking, ie. the
: writer, as did most followers of the Titanic story
: up to that time, believed the ship sank in one
: piece. But he does mention statements from a few
: survivors who were convinced the ship broke up
: on the surface. Other minor inaccuracies of a
: technical nature concerning the nature of the
: underwater damage are present - the true facts
: were only determined in the past few years.
: This book was probably the first exposure to
: the story of the Titanic by many members on this
: website (it was for me) so it has to be regarded
: as a major source of factual information. And it's
: a great read.
*** A Night To Remember was written in a time when so many of the survivors were still around. It represents an real tradeoff between the two times- 1958 with a wealth of survivor accounts- with so many survivors still around to answer questions put to them by Mr. Lord- to the present day where the only survivors were very young in 1912 (Mr. Navratil, for example). The book could be considered a classic by the amount of survivor accounts alone. These accounts somehow seem more credible than the 1912 newspaper accounts with all the probable hysteria and reporters paying for stories.
Compare 1958 to how we now have a wealth of information about the actual ship on the bottom and the plethora of images from the site, the "two sidewalk square" gash, the brittle steel, the images of the gates still locked. It represents an interesting contrast.