Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #283745 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Synopsis
Raging fires, pounding waves, heroic rescues, daring escapes - Dover's expert naval historian profiles history's most important passenger vessel disasters, from the Lusitania's 1915 torpedoing to the Oriana's destruction by a typhoon off China's coast in 2005. Miller also gives life to the tragic stories of the Morro Castle, Normandie, Andrea Doria, Europa, and other ill-fated ships.

Customer Reviews

An excellent photographic record of the fates of some really great ships.
In a book in which the legendary Titanic gets only a passing mention, this work seeks to explain with a minimum of detail how some of the greatest ever passenger liners were lost. Laid out in date order, we commence with the Lusitania in 1915 and progress almost year by year through some of the worst maritime tragedies of all time.

They really are all here, the Andrea Doria, Rex, Oceanos and Achille Lauro (to name but four). Each is afforded at least one photograph of excellent quality and a brief narrative which takes the reader through the life of the ship, her different names and, of course her fate before concluding with the details of her original build.

Many of the ships in this book have been the subject of my research for some years but many of the photographs used are quite new to me. Such is the quality of the pictures used.

NM

More history than drama
The book is a very good source of facts and archive pictures. I learned a few things. For instance, it's better to scuttle your ocean liner on an even keel if it catches fire in port, rather than to pump millions of gallons on to the upper decks and tip it over.

The book is laid out as blocks of text around archive black and white pictures of the ships. The text is quite dry and the pictures are sometimes little small. Each block of text on a ship ends with the statistics of size, capacity, speed etc.

It could have told dramatic stories or attempted to group and interpret common themes but it doesn't. Given the subject this would have opened these great stories to a wider audience. I also found one or two minor typos. It's a specialist history source book.