I read it as a kid

The most recent Five Books interview is about the "best books" about the sinking of the Titanic. One of the selections is A Night to Remember (1955). I read it a long time ago. I really disliked the relatively recent film, Titanic, partly because I knew a lot about what actually happened. I tend to get annoyed when historical events are unnecessarily fictionalized. On the book:

It’s hard to imagine anybody producing a more thrilling account of the Titanic than Walter Lord’s book from 1955. The Titanic has never really gone away, but between 1912-13 and 1955 there wasn’t a lot of sustained interest. Then Walter Lord came along and published A Night to Remember. It was a bestseller that has never gone out of print.

Lord’s book is a moment-by-moment telling of the events of the night of April 14 and the morning of April 15. What’s most skillful about it is the way that it moves around in space as it recreates these moments in time. From the outset, you get phrases like ‘meanwhile’ or ‘on the boat deck.’ He moves you around the ship, creating a sense of simultaneity, even as he’s conveying a sense of the vastness of the Titanic and all of these different experiences happening at the same time, from calm to panic. He also plays around with the pacing so that it’ll slow down to have Thomas Andrews, the ship’s designer, reflect on his career, or Isidor and Ida Straus reflecting on their marriage. And then the pace speeds up as the danger becomes clearer, the lifeboats are being loaded and launched, and the water is rising. It becomes a complete page turner by the time the ship is going down.

It’s also held up incredibly well in terms of accuracy. That’s in part because of the advantages he had writing this book in 1955 as opposed to later, because he could interview or correspond with 60-plus survivors. He was a meticulous researcher. He used newspapers, the British and American inquiries, the published survivors’ accounts, as well as his interviews and correspondence with survivors. He was careful about not reporting some of the more dubious stories that were told about the disaster at the time. .... (more)

Steven Biel, "The best books on The Titanic," Five Books, Feb. 22, 2026.