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Today's Featured Title and Contest |
May 18, 2016 |
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This Bookreporter.com Special Newsletter spotlights a book that we think is a great summer reading selection. Read more about it, and enter our Summer Reading Contest by Thursday, May 19th at 11:59am ET for a chance to win one of five copies of DEAD WAKE: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson, which is now available in paperback. Please note that each contest is only open for 24 hours, so you will need to act quickly!
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Today's Featured Book and Contest: DEAD WAKE: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, by Erik Larson
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On May 1, 1915, with World War I entering its 10th month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era’s great transatlantic “Greyhounds” --- the fastest liner then in service --- and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack.
Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger’s U-boat, but told no one. As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward Liverpool, an array of forces both grand and achingly small --- hubris, a chance fog, a closely guarded secret and more --- all converged to produce one of the great disasters of history.
It is a story that many of us think we know but don’t, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and suspense, DEAD WAKE brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love.
Gripping and important, DEAD WAKE captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster whose intimate details and true meaning have long been obscured by history.
-Click here to read a review.
-Read and listen to an excerpt.
-Click here for the discussion guide.
-Click here to visit Erik Larson's official website.
-Connect with Erik Larson on Facebook and Twitter.
-Click here to see Erik Larson talk about the book.
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Click here to enter the contest by Thursday, May 19th at 11:59am ET. |
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This is a special newsletter for our Summer Reading Contests, which will mail on select days through Thursday, August 25th. This newsletter is separate from our weekly Bookreporter.com newsletter, which mails every Friday. You can subscribe to that newsletter here.
Don't forget to visit our other websites from TheBookReportNetwork.com: 20SomethingReads.com, Teenreads.com, Kidsreads.com, ReadingGroupGuides.com, GraphicNovelReporter.com and AuthorsOnTheWeb.com.
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