A Night to Remember
James Cameron's 1997Titanicmovie is a smash hit, but Walter Lord's 1955 classic remains in some ways unsurpassed. Lord interviewed scores ofTitanicpassengers, fashioning a gripping you-are-there account of the ship's sinking that you can read in half the time it takes to see the film. The book boasts many perfect movie moments not found in Cameron's film. When the ship hits the berg, passengers see "tiny splinters of ice in the air, fine as dust, that give off myriads of bright colors whenever caught in the glow of the deck lights." Survivors saw dawn reflected off other icebergs in a rainbow of shades, depending on their angle toward the sun: pink, mauve, white, deep blue--a landscape so eerie, a little boy tells his mom, "Oh, Muddie, look at the beautiful North Pole with no Santa Claus on it."ATitanicfunnel falls, almost hitting a lifeboat--and consequently  washing it 30 yards away from the wreck, saving all lives aboard. One man calmly  rides the vertical boat down as it sinks,  steps into the sea, and doesn't even get his head wet while waiting to be  successfully rescued. On one side of the boat, almost no males are permitted in the lifeboats; on the other, even a male  Pekingese dog gets a seat. Lord includes a crucial, tragically ironic drama  Cameron couldn't fit into the film: the failure of the nearby shipCalifornianto save all those aboard the sinking vessel because distress lights  were misread as random flickering and the telegraph was an early wind-up model that no one wound.Lord's account is also smarter about the horrifying class structure of the  disaster, which Cameron reduces to hollow Hollywood formula. No children died in  the First and Second Class decks; 53 out of 76 children in steerage died.  According to the press, which regarded the lower-class passengers as a small  loss to society, "The night was a magnificent confirmation of women and  children first, yet somehow the loss rate was higher for Third Class children  than First Class men." As the ship sank, writes Lord, "the poop deck,  normally Third Class space ... was suddenly becoming attractive to all kinds of  people." Lord's logic is as cold as the Atlantic, and his bitter wit is  quite dry.