This was such a good book. I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys specifically WW1 or even just history in general. Erik Larson is a wonderful writer and an even better researcher. His books are always chock full of details, sometimes overwhelmingly so, but at the end of the day, I appreciate it.

He does such a wonderful job of capturing the atmosphere and emotion of the time period in which he writes. I walked away from this book not only with the new information (because yes, like he said in his author's note, I too somehow learned in school that the sinking of the Lusitania triggered the war and didn't realize the US entered the war two years later), but also with an understanding of how these people felt, of what they individually went through.

What Larson does so well, and the overall strength of this book, is that he captures both the big picture and the tiny details. He tells the story of Captain Turner, of Theodate Pope, of Grace French, of a dozen other passengers on the ship, but also the story of how the United States entered the war and how the faults of the British helped lead to the sinking of the Lusitania.

I thought this book was so well crafted in addition to having wonderful information, which is very different to how I felt after The Devil in the White City. This is a book I can't recommend enough, and has left me more excited to continue through all of Larson's work.