How to survive the Titanic

About this book

This book is a brilliantly original and gripping new look at the sinking of the Titanic through the prism of the life and lost honor of J. Bruce Ismay, the ship's owner. Books have been written and films have been made, we have raised the Titanic and watched her go down again on numerous occasions, but out of the wreckage Frances Wilson spins a new epic: when the ship hit the iceberg on April 14, 1912, and 1000 men, lighting their last cigarettes, prepared to die, J. Bruce Ismay, the ship's owner and inheritor of the White Star fortune, jumped into a lifeboat filled with women and children and rowed away to safety. Accused of cowardice and of dictating the Titanic's excessive speed, Ismay became, according to one headline, "the most talked-of man in the world." The first victim of a press hate campaign, he never recovered from the damage to his reputation, and while the other survivors pieced together their accounts of the night, Ismay never spoke of his beloved ship again. Using never-before-seen letters written by Ismay to the beautiful Marion Thayer, a first-class passenger with whom he had fallen in love during the voyage, Frances Wilson explores Ismay's desperate need to tell his story, to make sense of the horror of it all, and to find a way of living with the consciousness of lost honor. - Jacket flap.