Larson not only shows the figure known to the public, but delves into the intimate life of Wilson’s pining love for Edith Galt. Perhaps the most memorable and intimate though is the portrait Larson paints of the then United States President Woodrow Wilson. Other notable figures included Theodate Pope, “the first female architect licensed in Connecticut,” through who Larson shows the gross injustices done to women in the early 1900’s. We meet Charles Lauriat, a bookseller and collector who was travelling across the Atlantic with a rare copy of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. While some of the information provided can falter to the side of dry or disinteresting, for the most part Larson provides a strong platform for the reader to build empathy and connection with the “characters.” Larson zeros in on the Lusitania’s captain William Thomas Turner, the U-20 submarine’s captain who sunk the Lusitania Walther Schwieger, as well as a number of passengers aboard the vessel. A large part of this intrigue is owed to Larson’s profile of individuals whose lives were bound up in the Lusitania’s last voyage. Reading Dead Wake feels like reading a history textbook that’s far more interesting and accessible than your average 600+ page academic compilation of events.

Larson, best-selling author of Devil in the White City and In the Garden of Beasts, is known for his unique ability to retell historical events with a literary quality paralleled only by novels of fiction. Aside from the tragedy and horror of the event, the ship’s demise became solidified in history because it became one of the turning points in America’s involvement in World War I. Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson tells the story of the famed Lusitania, the passenger vessel sunk by a German submarine on May 7, 1915.

Author of dead wake