What Sank the World's Biggest Ship?: And Other Questions About the Titanic (Good Question!)
Structured as brief answers to 20 questions ranging from “Why did everyone think the Titanic was unsinkable?” to “After 100 years, why do people still care?,” this title kicks off the Good Question! series with an account of the disaster and analyses of the combination of miscues (the use of an inferior grade of rivets on the hull, a misplaced key to the locker where binoculars were stored, discounted warning signals) that led to it. The many, large illustrations are a mix of period photos and new painted art. Some of the new images are awkwardly integrated into the old, like a boy painted on top of a photograph of the second-class deck, and both text and a nearby picture incorrectly indicate that the ship’s fourth stack was a working one (it was largely decorative). Still, as a broad but compact view of the tragedy that incorporates recent discoveries, this makes at least a serviceable addition to the expanding literature on the topic. Grades 3-5. --John Peters