There are disasters at sea, and then there is the Titanic. Why its 1912 sinking still grips our imagination is not hard to fathom: mix rich people and those in steerage, the maiden voyage of the world’s largest ocean liner billed as “unsinkable,” only a score of lifeboats, and an iceberg, and you have a story for the ages. And a story told many times before Daniel Stone’s book. But what distinguishes Sinkable from its predecessors (the best of those remains Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember) is the author’s focus on what happened to the Titanic after it sank, chronicling the misconceived plans to raise it (electromagnets, anyone?), to find it (this by a man who also tried to locate Noah’s ark), and to claim it as property. Stone’s curiosity is infectious and his delivery droll, which makes Sinkable a buoyant pleasure to read.
Benjamin Franklin knew many things, but he knew nothing about dinosaurs. Neither did Napoleon or Goethe or anyone who died before 1842, when an Englishman named Richard Owen coined the term to describe the fragments of bone that were being discovered around England. And it wasn’t until 1902, when an enterprising fossil hunter named Barnum Brown unearthed the first T. Rexspecimen in the Montana wilderness, did the world begin to realize exactly what had roamed the earth more than 60 million years ago.
