A Night To Remember: Titanic History #review

Night to RememberA Night To Remember/
by Walter Lord
Henry Holt, 2005 edition
Trade Paperback (from library)

It has been over one hundred years since the Titanic disaster, and people are still fascinated by the ship and her fate. Lord’s classic account of the sinking is still noteworthy for the painstaking detail, much of it based on eyewitness accounts by survivors still alive in 1955. Step by step, he takes us through the events of that night, starting with the lookouts who didn’t see the iceberg in time because the binoculars they were supposed to be using were locked in a chest and the key was in London. (The result of a last-minute change in the officers assigned to the ship.)

We hear from people from all three passenger classes – the very wealthy, the middle class, and the lowly immigrants – and crew members from the officers to humble stewards. Though at times the book reads like fiction, it is not. He did an impressive amount of research which is detailed in the Acknowledgements section at the end. From the retrospective of the 21st century, the book represents an impressive undertaking in a world of print-only resources.

film posterI also rented the film, produced in 1958, but it wasn’t the movie I remembered from my childhood. That one was Titanic, starring Clifton Webb, which came out two years before Lord’s book. The film version of A Night To Remember is a British production starring Kenneth More as Second Officer Lightoller and a young David McCallum as Officer Lord. I was surprised at first to realize A Night To Remember was filmed in black and white, but I soon understood why. By not using color, they were able to mix archival footage of the actual ship with the movie reels. So we see the Titanic being christened and sailing off from Southampton as it really happened. There was no such thing as CGI in 1958!

For the best sense of what it might have been like to actually be on the Titanic, nothing can beat James Cameron’s 1997 epic. Like the fictional love story or despise it, the special effects are overwhelming and incredible. In my opinion, it deserved the Oscar simply for being a monumental and innovative piece of moviemaking. And the musical score is both beautiful and haunting.

After reading A Night To Remember, I think I understand why the story of the Titanic still draws us. It was one of the greatest disasters of all time, and it changed maritime history (and law) forever. But at its heart, it’s a very human story– of arrogance and hubris, negligence, bad luck and denial, bravery and cowardice, indifference and sacrifice. A testament to the bad and the good to be found in human nature. And for that reason, it is a story that will live forever in human memory.

At the end of a recent documentary on the Titanic, James Cameron talks about the ship as a microcosm of 1912 society, with its class distinctions. He also sees the image of the unwieldy ship sailing into the iceberg as a metaphor for a continent about to go over a cliff and into one of the most destructive and unnecessary wars of all time. (WWI) And then he talked about how things are not much different now. We are headed for an iceberg called “global climate change” and it’s too late to correct the system in time to prevent the crash.

If you haven’t read this book, I do recommend it.

Linda

Disclaimer: This review of Walter Lord’s A Night To Remember was first posted at my old Flights-a-Fancy blog on 6/6/12, and I’ve decided to recycle it today.

Book Review Club: The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel #ww2fiction #review

The Book of Lost Names cover

The Book of Lost Names
by Kristin Harmel
Gallery Books, Simon & Schuster, 2020

Set mostly in France, this is the story of Eva Traube, a French Jew of Polish descent. The book starts in 2005 with the elderly Eva, a librarian in Winter Park, FL. She sees a photo of a book she hasn’t seen for 40 years, a book looted by the Nazis during WWII. What makes the book notable is an intriguing puzzle inside the book, one that Eva put there during her days as a forger for the French resistance. She heads to Berlin to claim the book.

Then we go back to 1942 and most of the book is devoted to Eva’s flight from Paris and her relocation to a French village in the mountains not far from the Swiss border where she works as a forger for the Resistance and meets the love of her life, Remy. She also forges new papers with false identities for Jewish children who are being smuggled across the Swiss border. Bus she doesn’t want the children’s real names lost to history, so she and Remy figure out a way to record the names using a code in a very old religious book, one no one would pick up just to read.

I don’t want to say much more except I loved this book. Fascinating story line, exciting and very emotional. Recommended for fans of WWII fiction and women’s fiction.

Linda McLaughlin

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