Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania is a 2015 New York Times non-fiction bestseller written by Erik Larson.

Though we’ve heard far more about the 2240 people who died on the Titanic, the story of the Lusitania sinking 3 years later is a more compelling story.

1198 died on the Lusitania.

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.

The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. 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.

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Many questions were left unanswered from this disaster.

For example, was Churchill partly responsible?

Should he have provided naval protection for the American commercial ship?

Evidence seems against that conjecture.

Good book.

But his BEST is Devil in the White City.