Titanic's Last Secrets: The Further Adventures of Shadow Divers John Chatterto and Richie Kohler
By (Author) Bradford Matsen
Little, Brown & Company
Twelve
1st November 2009
3rd December 2009
United States
General
Non Fiction
910.91634
Paperback
336
Width 142mm, Height 219mm, Spine 23mm
410g
After rewriting history with their discovery of a Nazi U-boat off the coast of New Jersey, legendary divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler decided to investigate the great enduring mystery of history's most notorious shipwreck: why did Titanic sink as quickly as it did
To answer the question, Chatterton and Kohler assembled a team of experts to explore Titanic, studied its engineering, and dived to the wreck of its sister ship, Brittanic. Titanic's Last Secrets is a rollercoaster ride through the shipbuilding history, the transatlantic luxury liner business and shipwreck forensics. Chatterton and Kohler weave their way through a labyrinth of clues to discover that Titanic was not the strong, heroic ship the world thought she was and that the men who built her covered up her flaws when disaster struck. If Titanic had remained afloat for just two hours longer than she did, more than two thousand people would have lived instead of died and the myth of the great ship would be one of rescue instead of tragedy.Titanic's Last Secrets is a fresh, moving, and irresistible portrait of the doomed ship. Combining insightful character sketches, secret archives, forensic engineering, death-defying dives and suspenseful writing, Brad Matsen travels effortlessly between past and present and offers haunting new conclusions about Titanic: It did not have to happen this way. They did not have to die. I could not put this book down.
--Jemes L. Swanson, Edgar Award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer
Bradford Matsen is the author of Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss as well as many other books abou the sea and its inhabitants. He was a creative producer for the television series The Shape of Life, and his articles have appeared in Mother Jones, Audubon, and Nature, among other publications. He divides his time between Seattle and New York City.