He spent the next two years sifting through source material in Thorsminde, Denmark London Liverpool and Cambridge, England. “I’m always looking for a sign - not in a spooky, supernatural way, but in a neurotic writer kind of way,” Mr. When an archivist brought him a plank from a wrecked Lusitania lifeboat, he took it as encouragement to keep digging. “I usually look for stories with barriers to entry, something complex enough that no one else is going to do it.”īut when he started reading through the archives at Stanford, he realized he didn’t know much about the sinking of the Lusitania, and that much of what he thought he knew was wrong. Larson, 61, said during a recent interview at his Upper East Side apartment overlooking Central Park. “It was, by my standards, low hanging fruit,” Mr. Larson, who specializes in adrenaline-fueled historical narratives (in past books he’s written about serial killers, a killer storm and a homicidal doctor), he was reluctant to tackle the subject at first. Though the Lusitania seems like the ideal story for Mr. Crown is printing 250,000 copies and is sending Mr.
1 spot on Amazon’s best-seller list several days before its release. Larson turns the already heavily chronicled destruction of the Lusitania into a sort of geopolitical thriller, one that reads like a brainy mash-up of James Cameron’s “Titanic” and Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” with the invisible menace of the submarine spreading panic among seafarers like a rogue great white shark. Larson’s new book, “Dead Wake,” to be released by Crown on Tuesday, is shaping up to be one of the biggest nonfiction titles of the year. Larson, and helped persuade him that he had found the subject of his next book.įive years and eight drafts later, Mr. Schwieger’s complexity as a character fascinated Mr. Some 95 years later, Erik Larson, the author of best-selling historical narratives like “The Devil in the White City” and “In the Garden of Beasts,” came across Schwieger’s journal and other dramatic testimonials at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The distressed witness was Walther Schwieger, a German submarine captain who just minutes before had fired a torpedo into the ship, the Lusitania, killing 1,198 of its 1,959 passengers, in one of the most devastating maritime disasters in history. It was impossible for me to give any help.” “Desperate people ran helplessly up and down the decks,” one horrified eyewitness wrote, adding: “It was the most terrible sight I have ever seen. On a clear afternoon about 100 years ago, a large British passenger ship started sinking off the coast of Ireland, listing violently as it was sucked down into the ocean.
0 kommentar(er)
