Rating: 
Summary: A Book to Remember
Review: No matter how many times you revisit it, A NIGHT TO REMEMBER, the granddaddy of all Titanic books, remains as fresh a read today as it did fifty years ago. Walter Lord is still universally regarded as "the man who knows everything about the Titanic" and this fast-paced, detail-laden, and dramatically visualized book is the reason why and the product of that reason.
A NIGHT TO REMEMBER transports you to the decks of the Titanic that cold April night so convincingly that you are left with an eerie chill-between-your-shoulder blades feeling as the great ship goes down.
You share the early complacency of the passengers on the 'unsinkable' ship. Your sense of impending doom grows as the bows disappear below the glassy Atlantic. You grit your teeth at the obtuseness of the crew of the Californian---why, oh why, didn't they question those white rockets?---and you share in the breathless trauma of those on shore as the story unfolds.
Sure, since the discovery of the wreck many questions have been answered (and a few more posed). Some of Lord's information is dated (the ship did in fact break in half, for example). There have been other 'Titanic' books, and they explore almost every aspect of the disaster in meticulous detail; even Lord's follow-up THE NIGHT LIVES ON falls into this category. But no one has ever told the story of the RMS Titanic any better, and it's likely they never will.
Rating:
Summary: The firstest with the mostest
Review: For those of you who are Titanic aficionados, practically everything you will have read or seen about the incident probably used this book as a major reference. Which makes it the Titanic Bible. No, we don't get the love story, but there is enough here to make your emotions work the way they're supposed to. While there are other studies, what makes this one valuable is that the author interviewed over sixty survivors for the work. This is obviously a feat that can never be duplicated again, so we need to thank Walter Lord for getting the information while we can. So we get the statistics of the ship, which are interesting. We also get to know the changes made to sea travel, and society in general due to the incident. But we also get what have now become the famous "What ifs?". There are almost a dozen things, from ship construction to someone merely taking a telegram more seriously, where, if just were to go the other way, it's very possible that nearly everybody could have been rescued. This is essential reading for those interested in the topic.
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