The last thing Brad Matsen wanted to do was add to the world’s voluminous collection of books about the Titanic. There are at least 1,000 treatments written in the English language, according to one collector, and a recent Amazon search turned up 3,434 books on the "sinking of the Titanic."
"There are three things about which more words have been written than any other in the English language," says Matsen, speaking with me on the phone from his home on Vashon Island, Washington. "Those are Jesus, the JFK assassination, and Titanic."
The other reason Matsen didn't initially warm to his agent's idea that he write a book about the Titanic disaster is that he would be collaborating with famed "Shadow Divers" John Chatterton and Richie Kohler. Author Robert Kurson had already written about the pair, and Matsen didn't want to suffer the comparison, to be known as the author of 'Son of Shadow Divers.'
However, after meeting with Jon Karp, editor at the publishing house Twelve, Matsen changed his mind. "I realized that half this book should be about the people who built the ship," he explains.
That ground was left relatively untrammeled by previous Titanic writers, who either spoke of the builders in heroic-tragic terms, or villified them. No one had shown them in all their complex, damning glory the way Matsen now has.
Titanic's Last Secrets opens with the discovery of "ribbons of steel," pieces of the ship that show damage from compression and tension. Together with other evidence, the finding proves that Titanic's structure was unsound. But after this first section on the divers and their discovery, Matsen chronicles the lives of the men who built the Titanic so that we might come to understand how they could make moral compromises that led to the deaths of more than 2,000 people, and then cover it up.
That's right. Newly uncovered evidence in the company's own archives reveals that executives knew about Titanic's structural defects — and tried to counterract them — before its fatal voyage, and that they staged a cover up after the ship sunk.
Article comments
1 - Philip
Sadly, this book contains a glaring error. It mentions an individual , Philip Franklin, throughout the book. The name is misspelled. The correct spelling is Philip NOT Phillip. The Franklin spoke of in the book spelled his name with only ONE L, Philip!
2 - kara
the story of the titanic is a tragedy noboady knows what really happened so here is my story. it was a dark dark night the titanic was sailing west of the atlantic ocean to new york , but right in the middle of it's route it sank the tragedy begins.the titanic hit a iceberg the size of montana. the ice berg scraped the bottom of the titanic that was in the water. making big gashes in th bottom half flooding the bottom cabins of the ship making it's way to the top side.one of the captins warned the passengers but noone freaked out.for the passengers it was there night the alone time their time to sine but NO that is not how it happened instead it was the time to DIE. it took the titanic at least 3 hours to sink. only 31.58 of them were saved 48.62 died.that is the story of the titanic.
3 - Kerry Tremain
For people interested in the author and his career, he's got a new blog at Brad Matsen.
His lastest book is a biography of Jacques Cousteau.