Titanic: Disaster at Sea
This handsome, oversize title sets itself apart from this year’s other Titanic books by taking each segment of the journey and exploding it into a panoply of tidbits, sidebars, profiles, time lines, and anything else you can think of. It’s a veritable museum in book form, and it’s at its best when providing schemata for hard-to-describe facts, such as the distribution of lifeboats; the percentages of men, women, and staff who survived; how one too many water compartments became flooded; and so on. The four-page pull-out cutaway of the ship is among the finest yet produced, and is replicated on a poster that comes packaged with each book. The computer-generated illustrations of onboard life aren’t always up to snuff, but everything else, from the historical photos to the artifacts rescued from the ocean floor, is excellent. Even the oddest spread, about various curses and predictions, fascinates. The rapid pace and sparse back matter makes this of limited use as a resource, but it’s ideal for browsers—if this doesn’t hook them on the Titanic, what will? Grades 5-8. --Daniel Kraus