In this New York Times bestseller, the author of A Night to Remember and The Miracle of Dunkirk revisits the Titanic disaster. Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember was a landmark work that recounted the harrowing events of April 14, 1912, when the British ocean liner RMS Titanic went down in the North Atlantic Ocean, a book that inspired a classic movie of the same name. In The Night Lives On, Lord takes the exploration further, revealing information about the ship’s last hours that emerged in the decades that followed, and separating myths from facts. Was the ship really christened before setting sail on its maiden voyage? What song did the band play as water spilled over the bow? How did the ship’s wireless operators fail so badly, and why did the nearby Californian, just ten miles away when the Titanic struck the iceberg, not come to the rescue? Lord answers these questions and more, in a gripping investigation of the night when approximately 1,500 victims were lost to the sea.
In 1988, when Robert Clark was in his early twenties, he traveled to Odessa, Texas, to create a visual element for a book about a high school football team. That book was Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights—the chronicle of a season with the Permian Panthers, one of the state’s winningest teams of all time. About twenty photos appeared in Bissinger’s book, but Clark shot 137 rolls of film during his time with the Panthers. Friday Night Lives collects dozens of the never-before-seen images, taking us back to the team, the city, and that dramatic season. The archival photos, published here on the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Bizzinger's bestseller, capture intimate moments among the players and their families and classmates, as well as the wider world of Odessa. Now the players have grown up. Friday Night Lives also includes Clark’s portraits of key Panthers figures at a later age, documenting complex lives of beauty and struggle. Boobie Miles, the star fullback sidelined by injury, is here, along with Coach Gaines and others. In his heartfelt foreword, best-selling author Hanif Abdurraqib describes how Clark's photos rehumanize the players, reminding us of the truth of their young lives before their stories became nationally known in print, film, and television.
The New York Times–bestselling author of Unsinkable “recounts the disaster from the vantage point of nearby vessels” (Publishers Weekly). A few minutes before midnight on April 14, 1912, the “unsinkable” RMS Titanic, on her maiden voyage to New York, struck an iceberg. Less than three hours later, she lay at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. While the world has remained fascinated by the tragedy, the drama of those fateful hours was not only played out aboard the doomed liner. It also took place on the decks of two other ships, one fifty-eight miles distant from the sinking Titanic, the other barely ten miles away. The masters of the steamships Carpathia and Californian, Capt. Arthur Rostron and Capt. Stanley Lord, were informed within minutes of each other that their vessels had picked up the distress signals of a sinking ship. Their actions in the hours and days that followed would become the stuff of legend, as one would choose to take his ship into dangerous waters to answer the call for help, while the other would decide that the hazard to himself and his command was too great to risk responding. After years of research, Daniel Allen Butler now tells this incredible story, moving from ship to ship on the icy waters of the North Atlantic—in real time—to recount how hundreds of people could have been rescued, but in the end, only a few outside of the meager lifeboats were saved. He then looks at the US Senate investigation in Washington, and ultimately, the British Board of Trade inquiry in London, where the actions of each captain are probed, questioned, and judged, until the truth of what actually happened aboard the Titanic, the Carpathia, and the Californian is revealed. “Powerful . . . very, very well-done.” —New York Times–bestselling author Clive Cussler
Marking the centenary of the Titanic disaster, ‘Titanic Lives’ is an utterly compelling exploration of the lives of the passengers and crew on board the most famous ship in history.
Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage takes us behind the paneled doors of the Titanic’s elegant private suites to present compelling, memorable portraits of her most notable passengers. The Titanic has often been called "An exquisite microcosm of the Edwardian era,” but until now, her story has not been presented as such. In Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage, historian Hugh Brewster seamlessly interweaves personal narratives of the lost liner’s most fascinating people with a haunting account of the fateful maiden crossing. Employing scrupulous research and featuring 100 rarely seen photographs, he accurately depicts the ship’s brief life and tragic denouement and presents compelling, memorable portraits of her most notable passengers: millionaires John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim; President Taft's closest aide, Major Archibald Butt; writer Helen Churchill Candee; the artist Frank Millet; movie actress Dorothy Gibson; the celebrated couturiere Lady Duff Gordon; aristocrat Noelle, the Countess of Rothes; and a host of other travelers. Through them, we gain insight into the arts, politics, culture, and sexual mores of a world both distant and near to our own. And with them, we gather on the Titanic’s sloping deck on that cold, starlit night and observe their all-too-human reactions as the disaster unfolds. More than ever, we ask ourselves, “What would we have done?”
“860 glittering pages” (Janet Maslin, The New York Times): The first volume of the full-scale astonishing life of one of our greatest screen actresses—her work, her world, her Hollywood through an American century. Frank Capra called her, “The greatest emotional actress the screen has yet known.” Now Victoria Wilson gives us the first volume of the rich, complex life of Barbara Stanwyck, an actress whose career in pictures spanned four decades beginning with the coming of sound (eighty-eight motion pictures) and lasted in television from its infancy in the 1950s through the 1980s. Here is Stanwyck, revealed as the quintessential Brooklyn girl whose family was in fact of old New England stock; her years in New York as a dancer and Broadway star; her fraught marriage to Frank Fay, Broadway genius; the adoption of a son, embattled from the outset; her partnership with Zeppo Marx (the “unfunny Marx brother”) who altered the course of Stanwyck’s movie career and with her created one of the finest horse breeding farms in the west; and her fairytale romance and marriage to the younger Robert Taylor, America’s most sought-after male star. Here is the shaping of her career through 1940 with many of Hollywood's most important directors, among them Frank Capra, “Wild Bill” William Wellman, George Stevens, John Ford, King Vidor, Cecil B. Demille, Preston Sturges, set against the times—the Depression, the New Deal, the rise of the unions, the advent of World War II, and a fast-changing, coming-of-age motion picture industry. And at the heart of the book, Stanwyck herself—her strengths, her fears, her frailties, losses, and desires—how she made use of the darkness in her soul, transforming herself from shunned outsider into one of Hollywood’s most revered screen actresses. Fifteen years in the making—and written with full access to Stanwyck’s family, friends, colleagues and never-before-seen letters, journals, and photographs. Wilson’s one-of-a-kind biography—“large, thrilling, and sensitive” (Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Town & Country)—is an “epic Hollywood narrative” (USA TODAY), “so readable, and as direct as its subject” (The New York Times). With 274 photographs, many published for the first time.
"Martin's narrative of this talented lawyer includes not only an account of his relationships with Mayor La Guardia and others, but also details about Burlingham's private life - his eccentric wife; his tragically afflicted son; and his daughter-in-law Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, who took CCB's grandchildren off to Vienna, where she was analyzed by Sigmund Freud, and her children by Anna Freud."--BOOK JACKET.
Alex McDonagh is a 25-year-old girl who’s well and truly stuck in a rut! In a dead-end retail job and living alone in a tiny Sydney flat, she lies awake at night searching for solutions to her mounting problems and formulating a plan to escape the debt-ridden hole she’s in. Turning to alcohol is not the escape she needs. There seems to be no way out. But just when she thinks she’s hit rock bottom, help comes from some very unlikely sources. Through them, Alex learns life lessons that show her not only the person she has become, but how others perceive her as well. This presents a unique opportunity to change course and ultimately help not just herself, but everyone close to her too. How Alex will use this chance to lead a full and satisfying life is for her alone to discover.
During an era when millions of Jews fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe, the Titanic sailed on her maiden voyage. At the time, she was the largest and most luxurious ship ever built and many of her 2,200 passengers were Jewish. At 23:40, April 14, (28th of Nissan 5672) the Titanic swiped an iceberg and sank within two and a half hours. Most of her passengers lost their lives. The sinking of the Titanic was one of the worst and well known maritime disasters of the 20th century. The entire world mourned the Titanic. The grief was universal and shared by people of many nations and religions. This book focuses on the lives and deaths of the Jewish passengers who sailed on the Titanic. It covers various Jewish aspects of the voyage and of the sinking. Aspects, such as keeping kosher, the Agunot dilemma and Jewish burial. The book outlines the life story of the passengers and the effect the disaster made on world Jewry. This book is the result of a long research on the subject, including an attempt to compose a unique and complete list of all the Jews who sailed on the Titanic, and identifying many of them who were previously unknown.
