Join us the first Monday of each month in reading and discussing books with a global perspective. All discussion sessions begin at 6:00 p.m.
APRIL 2nd SELECTION:
Dead Wake: Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson
On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth 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.