Crossing & Cruising: From the Golden Era of Ocean Liners to the Luxury Cruise Ships of Today
Today's ships are "less grand hotel than grand mall," contends maritime historian and shipboard lecturer Maxtone-Graham in the concluding volume of a nostalgic trilogy ( The Only Way to Cross ; Liners to the Sun ), a book that is likely to delight steamship buffs. The vessels, he notes, have changed more than their passengers. Liberally illustrated and rich in nautical lore, the book contrasts today's "giant floating theme parks," designed expressly to provide "total-immersion escapism" for fun-bent cruise guests, with the more purposeful ocean carriers of the past. Maxtone-Graham evokes the crowded, stifling steerage quarters of millions of deloused, often seasick immigrants, the ordeal that awaited immigrants upon their arrival at Ellis Island and, in later years, the annual eastbound migrations of vast numbers of culture-hungry tourists and students aboard Edwardian and Beaux-Arts superliners from the Aquitania to the Queens (and the incomparable Normandie , to which he devotes a chapter). Photos not seen by PW.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.