Titanic: Triumph and Tragedy

"For me, this is the indispensable reference book on the Titanic. It’s enormous. It’s lavishly illustrated. The index alone makes it essential. Eaton was a self-described New York bohemian whose day job was working at a hospital in Manhattan. Haas was a high school teacher in New Jersey. They were both early members of an organization called the Titanic Historical Society, which was initially a small group formed in 1963 of Titanic hobbyists. Eaton and Haas made themselves into two of the world’s foremost experts on the Titanic. The book was originally published in the late 1980s, then in a revised edition in the late 1990s. Its chronology extends far backward and forward from the night of the disaster. It starts with the founding of the White Star Line and goes all the way through to Robert Ballard’s discovery of the wreck in the 1980s and beyond to some of the salvage expeditions. I especially like it because I can never keep track of facts about the Titanic. It’s not my approach to the subject. I didn’t get into this as somebody who had a mastery of all things Titanic. I still sometimes might mistakenly forget that Lowe was the fifth officer instead of the fourth. So anything like that that you want to know is there, and it’s got an appendix that lists all of the passengers. For me, its narrative aside, it’s just an extremely useful resource. The range of photos is stunning. There are photos of passengers, photos of the ship itself under construction, photos of the lifeboats, plans, menus, the wreck site, pretty much anything about the Titanic you could want. I got into this subject before it was all over the internet. It was especially useful back then. But it’s still incredibly valuable as an exhaustive collection of reliable information in print in one place."