PROGRAM

Join us for a special evening featuring Erik Larson, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Devil in the White City and In the Garden of Beasts, who will introduce his new book, Dead Wake, the story of the sinking of the Lusitania one hundred years ago.

On May 1, 1915, less than a year after the start of World War I, 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. 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 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.

With the skill and narrative verve his readers admire, Larson tells a story that many of us think we know but don’t, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era.