I had a hard time keeping track of who was who and what was going on. I will try this again some other time. ( )

Continuing adventures of the Shadow Divers. Not very much of their story this time, but interesting history of the Titanic. ( )

This book is about the people who discovered the Titanic. They decide to go back for a second look to find out why the Titanic really sunk. Did you ever wonder why the titanic sink without more of a warning? I think that this book is a must read for all!
This audio book was loaned to me by a friend ( )

The slightly long-winded subtitle of this book reveals its biggest conceptual problem: Matson's desire to make it "about" celebrity wreck divers Chatterton and Kohler. The long opening and closing sections of the book, which follow the divers, are engagingly written but not really worth the space Matson gives them Had the divers in question been John Doe and Bob Smith, their discoveries could have been covered in a handful of pages without diminishing the central narrative of the story in the slightest.

And make no mistake about it: Matson's central narrative is both readable and fascinating. He covers the Titanic disaster from a perspective that I've not encountered in the six or eight books I've read on the subject: that of the builders. He tells the story of the White Star Lines (the company that ordered Titanic and her sisters), of Harland and Wolff (the yard that built them), and of the men who did the actual work. Matson has a nice eye for detail, and he uses it to convey some of the feel of working in a turn-of-the-century shipyard. It's not a book about ship design or labor history, but you learn a lot about both in the course of following the construction of the Titanic. You also get one of the most lucid explanations I've ever read of the reason why the big ship had only 16 lifeboats -- enough for less than half of those on board. (It had little to do with arrogance or over-confidence, and much to do with the price of coal.)

All this fascinating detail and well-written narrative is deployed in the service of a new interpretation of how (and why) the Titanic sank: She was insufficiently stiff, and as her bows filled with water after hitting the iceberg the weight of the water stressed her hull in ways she had no hope of withstanding. She "broke deep and took water," as Gordon Lightfoot once sang of the Great Lakes iron-ore freighter Edmund Fitzgerald, slipping beneath the waves well before (almost) anyone aboard expected her to. Matson's theory undoes a lot of what we thought we knew about the Titanic, but it accounts, plausibly, for a number of details that seemed inexplicable before. Whether you, the reader, ultimately buy his explanation or not, exploring it is a fascinating exercise.

Believe the title, not the subtitle: Chatterton and Kohler are just supporting characters in this always well-written, often gripping book. The central figures are the Titanic and those who built and ran her.

A good read and a must for every Titanic buff but you'll have to push yourself through the first few chapters where Matsen tries to "get real" by quoting (without quotation marks by the way) the "manly banter" between John Chatterton and Richie Kholer, the so-called Shadow Divers. They add virtually nothing to the story except to mention the Shadow Divers and lend a "they got me" (to buy another self-aggrandizing Titanic book) aura to an otherwise well written book. Once Matsen gets into the history, the book is hard to put down, but as the fates would have it, he eventually returns to those rascally Shadow Divers and ends on a somewhat down note. As a Titanic buff, my one criticism is Matsen's conclusion that not only was Titanic a fatally flawed ship but was intentionally so. Not true. The world was learning how to build big ships and, yes, they made mistakes, fatal ones, but not intentionally. It's easy to criticize nearly 100 years after the fact. By that measure, we should indict NASA for purposely sending Apollo 13 into orbit with a fatally flawed power cells. Nevertheless, a good read and a recommendation. ( )