For whatever reason I've always liked "Night Lives On" a little bit more than "Night to Remember." Perhaps it's because it adds more scope to the tale, extending the story into the 1980's and the discovery of the luxury liner in the deep. They're both fantastic reads! ( )

An excellent companion piece to Walter Lord's masterclass in narrative history, A Night to Remember. In this follow-up, Lord discusses in greater detail many things which fell between the cracks in his more bracing, earlier narrative, and also some things which only became apparent in the thirty years between the publications of his two Titanic books. The Night Lives On will not appeal as an introduction to the subject; Lord assumes an intermediate knowledge of the disaster on the part of the reader, and goes immediately into a deep delve. If you are looking for a gripping introductory narrative, his earlier A Night to Remember is impeccable.

As ever, the whole Titanic legend remains fascinating; I tentatively approached a book which looked, on the face of it, to be more for the anoraks than its predecessor, only to get swept up in it all once again. From whether the Titanic was ever called 'unsinkable', or whether this was a post-disaster media invention, to how the bridge officers dealt with warnings of ice, to questions of Captain Smith's competency in handling big ships, to who exactly determined how many lifeboats the ship should hold. Questions over the role played by the Californian, that would-be Good Samaritan which kept its distance (Lord says if he had a time machine that "could transport me back and let me spend an hour any place I wanted on the night of April 14-15, 1912, I would not spend that hour on the Titanic. I'd spend it on the bridge of the Californian." (pg. 190)). Sober discussion over whether shots were fired by the officers to maintain order, and – the big question – what song it was that the band played.

This book was published less than a year after the wreck was discovered by Robert Ballard in 1985, and there is an eerie sort of thrill in Lord recounting how Ballard's team watched the camera feed from their deep-sea robot, in the dead of night, and saw one of the great liner's distinctive boilers loom into view out of the pitch-black deep, just as seventy-three years before, men in the crow's nest of that ship had watched an iceberg loom into view in the dark. History is never that far away from us, and in the hands of a historian as lucid as Walter Lord, it is close enough to touch. ( )

This book is a fascinating look at all of the mysteries and "what if's" of the Titanic tragedy. It was written by the same author as "A Night to Remember," only it was written around 20 years later-- after the discovery of the sunken ship. The author is a true Titanic historian and sifts through the TONS of material available on the topic. However, the organization of the book is a bit jarring. Rather than telling the story in chronological order, he organizes it by topics. For example, there is a chapter dedicated to the band, another to the Captain, another to the gash in the ship made by the iceberg. While this organizations makes sense and groups all of the available data on each of these topics together, it is also a bit redundant since several of the topics overlap. The last few hours that the ship was afloat are relived over and over again while examining all of the different angles of the story. In addition, the book sort-of fizzles out at the end.

Overall, the book was a fascinating and educational look at the Titanic tragedy, and I would recommend it to other readers. ( )

An excellent book - very different from "A Night To Remember," but as valuable and as well-done. This book focuses more on the mechanics and technology of the disaster. Lord told the human side of the story better than anyone in his first book. Here he is much more clinical - citing chapter and verse from the hearings, the memoirs, the statements, every source he could find.

He corrects some mis-statements and misconceptions he inadvertently passed on in his first book. He devotes an entire chapter to the musicians (always one of my favorite parts of the story), and spends some time on the captain of the Carpathia. He bases one chapter on the world of the steerage patients by focusing on a family named Goodwin, parents and six children, who were all lost. He is quite a bit less in awe of Captain Smith - and seems more willing to believe the man could be guilty of "a certain slackness." And of course, he includes a lot of material about Robert Ballard, and his 1985 discovery of the Titanic wreck. ( )

This is a fun book to read when you have nothing else. I liked it overall. ( )