Lost to Time: Unforgettable Stories That History Forgot
*Starred Review* Such a splendid book, full of fascinating, well-told tales. Here’s the Sultana, a 260-foot steamboat that sank in 1865 with a death toll higher than that of the Titanic. Here’s America’s first subway, constructed in New York under utmost security in 1870, more than 30 years before the current subway system opened. Here’s Exercise Tiger, a rehearsal for the 1944 D-Day invasion of Normandy that, believe it or not, led to more deaths than the actual Utah Beach attack. Here’s Gustave Whitehead (born Gustav Weisskopf), a German immigrant who piloted a powered aircraft a full two years before the Wright brothers. And that’s just a taste of this eye-opening book. Historian Sandler has assembled a diverse and bafflingly overlooked collection of historical curiosities, forcing us to wonder how it’s possible that we never learned this stuff in school? In some cases, there are explanations: the Sultana sinking, for example, was overshadowed in the press by the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination 13 days earlier, and the Exercise Tiger debacle was covered up for decades. But in other cases we’re just left scratching our heads, wondering how these remarkable moments in history were allowed to slip through the cracks of time. --David Pitt