Titanic's Last Secrets
Titanic aftershocks by Brad Matsen
What meat could possibly be left on the bones of the Titanic? Plenty, it seems. If you buy one book as a present this Christmas, make it this one, because it's a real page-turner by a masterful story-teller.
Titanic's Last Secrets makes a convincing, diver-led case for the true facts behind the famous sinking in 1912 having been obscured in a monumental cover-up by the Harland & Wolff shipyard and the White Star line.
The man who discovered the Titanic wreck in the 1980s, Bob Ballard, and the man who later gave the world those spectacular movie images, James Cameron, did not react too well to the evidence this book throws up.
However, it seems it's time to cast aside Cameron's vision of the opulent liner ripped asunder by an iceberg and sliding noisily to the bottom, stern uppermost. Its demise may well have been quieter and more insidious, the outcome of greed and human frailty.
Titanic's Last Secrets came about when 'Shadow Divers' John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, stars of US TV's Deep Wreck Detectives, decided to invest - somewhat recklessly -in a project to descend to the wreck in MIR submarines and check out a report of 'ribbons of metal'confided to them by a previous visitor.
What they found on their 2.4-mile descents was not at all what they had expected. It led to a chain of research and reconstruction, and a vital encounter with a man who had guarded secrets of Harland & Wolff that might otherwise have been forgotten over the years.
Finally it led to a dive, thrillingly described in the book, to Titanic's sister-ship Britannic off Greece, to validate the Shadow Divers' theory.
On second thoughts, don't buy this book as a Christmas gift, buy it for yourself. Enjoy.
Steve Weinman
Little, Brown Book Group
ISBN 9780446582056
Hardback, 325pp, £17.99
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