Join your fellow Hoos for monthly Book Club!
Monday, July 17th
7:00 pm
Silver Diner
3200 Wilson Boulevard
Arlington, VA 22201
Metro: Clarendon (Orange Line)
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
by Erik Larson
Book Description:
“On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era’s great transatlantic “Greyhounds”-the fastest liner then in service-and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack.
Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game… As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward Liverpool, an array of forces both grand and achingly small-hubris, a chance fog, a closely guarded secret, and more-all converged to produce one of the great disasters of history.
It is a story that many of us think we know but don’t, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era…Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster whose intimate details and true meaning have long been obscured by history.” – Amazon editor
Please email Simay and Jess at uvabookclub@dchoos.org for more information.