The Titanic Disaster Hearings: the Official Transcripts of the 1912 US Senate Investigation
When Tom Kuntz, the "Word for Word" section editor of theNew York Times, started researching a column on the Senate hearings about  theTitanicdisaster, he discovered that this supposedly public  information was tough for the public to come by--it was stuck away in archives  on cumbersome microfiche. TheTimesjust hates anything that comes  between people and information--just look at its historic efforts to publicize  the government's Vietnam policy in the recent bookThe Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case. So Kuntz intelligently excerpted  and published, for the first time ever, these transcripts, noting without fear  or favor his own paper's participation in the then-common practice of checkbook journalism and presenting hundreds of pages of gripping eyewitness testimony.The Titanic Disaster Hearingsalso includes a helpful, if  rather brief, index to the testimony, so you can look up "Lookout men,  glasses for" and turn to the page with this heartbreaking discussion of the  owners' inexplicable refusal to give the lookouts binoculars:SENATOR SMITH: Suppose you had had [binoculars], could you have seen this black  object [the iceberg] a greater distance?MR. FLEET [aTitaniclookout]: We could have seen it a bit sooner.SENATOR SMITH: How much sooner?MR. FLEET: Well, enough to get out of the way..."Here the world learned of Isidor and Ida Straus's decision to die together  rather than separate under the 'women and children first' evacuation  tradition," writes Kuntz. "Archibald Gracie vividly described people  swarming up theTitanic's rear decks as the ship plunged deeper into the  sea." One does not envy the wireless operators explaining how their state-of-the-art system managed to screw up so badly, norTitanicofficer  Pitman, who claimed his passengers and crewmen refused his order to row back to  pick up screaming survivors in their boat, which had room for 20 more people,  because they feared those in the water would swamp them:SENATOR SMITH: How many of these cries were there? Was it a chorus, or was it--MR. PITMAN: I would rather you did not speak about that.SENATOR SMITH: I would like to know how you were impressed by it.MR. PITMAN: Well, I can not very well describe it. I would rather you would not  speak of it.SENATOR SMITH: I realize that it is not a pleasant theme, and yet I would like  to know whether these cries were general and in chorus, or desultory and  occasional?MR. PITMAN: There was a continual moan for about an hour.There are 32 useful pictures in the book, but its raison d'être is words,  which Kuntz has compiled and arranged in an addictively readable fashion.