Historical

April 15th, 2012, will be the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. People have an endless fascination with the ship, yet much of what they know today is a mixture of fact and fiction. Tim Maltin reveals the truth behind the most common beliefs about the ship and the night it sank.

A Rare Titanic Family follows all the true-life plot twists of a family who successfully fled aboard the Titanic but never could get out from under the shadow the ship cast over them.

Calling all Titanic buffs, hobbyists, and ship lovers: you’re invited to build a cardboard model of the formidable and notorious vessel! Marking the 100th anniversary of the Titanic’s fated maiden voyage in 1912, Taschen’s Build Your Own Titanic is the perfect way to commemorate.

For decades Walter Cronkite was heralded as “the most trusted man in America,” from his first reports on the frontlines of World War II to anchoring the CBS Evening News until his retirement in 1981. Yet for the most part he was a remarkably private man. Brinkley, through analysis of Cronkite’s private papers and interviews with family and friends, now brings the American icon into a focus like never before.

Aristocratic amateur sleuth Dandy Gilver is caught between two feuding families in the second mystery in this charming and funny series. When the heiress to one of the stores goes missing, Dandy is summoned to Dunfermline, where two warring families run rival department stores.

When the Titanic sank in April 1912 after hitting an iceberg, killing more than 1,500 people, the world was forever changed and the public has been spellbound ever since. Now, a century later, the ship is about to disappear again: its infrastructure is set to collapse in the next few years. In this book, scientist Charles Pellegrino offers what may be the last opportunity to see the ship before it is lost to the seas for eternity.

The day Louisiana teenager Rory Deveaux arrives at her new London boarding school, a series of brutal murders breaks out across the city, gruesome crimes mimicking the horrific Jack the Ripper events of more than a century ago. The police are baffled --- but Rory discovers she can see the murderer when no one else can --- and he’s not the only one she sees...

The Titanic For Dummies paints the whole picture of the most famous maritime disaster. It examines the building of the ship, life onboard during its maiden voyage, tragic decisions made that fateful night, the discovery of the wreck, and the many controversies that have emerged in the century since the sinking.

On that fatal night in 1912 the world’s largest moving object disappeared beneath the waters of the North Atlantic in less than three hours. There are many questions surrounding its sinking. This electrifying account vividly recreates the vessel’s last desperate hours afloat and fully addresses the questions that have continued to haunt the tragedy of the Titanic.

Using the most famous passengers of the Titanic, poet Allan Wolf offers a breathtaking, intimate glimpse at the lives behind the tragedy, told with clear-eyed compassion and astounding emotional power.

These are the leaders whose outsized personalities and actions brought order to postwar chaos: Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Robert Lovett,  John McCloy,  and Charles Bohlen.

Rather than offering simply a detailed retelling of the Titanic sinking, John Maxtone-Graham devotes his considerable knowledge and impeccable prose to a discussion of salient, provocative, and rarely investigated components of the story.

Explore the glory and tragedy of the Ttitanic in a fascinating book that traces the events leading up to her fateful end.

In his famous book A Night to Remember, Walter Lord described the sinking of the Titanic as "the last night of a small town." Now, a hundred years after her sinking, historian John Welshman reconstructs the fascinating individual experiences of twelve of the inhabitants of this tragically short-lived floating village.

LIFE.com offers a selection of images from the book: pictures that remind us, poignantly, not only of the phenomenal, harrowing scope of the Titanic disaster, but of its human cost --- a cost measured in the lives of individuals, and families, whose world was upended, forever, on a cold night in the North Atlantic one hundred years ago.

Packed with heart-stopping action, devastating drama, fascinating historical details, loads of archival photographs on almost every page, and quotes from primary sources, this gripping story, which follows the Titanic and its passengers from the ship's celebrated launch at Belfast to her cataclysmic icy end, is sure to thrill and move readers.

Unsinkable provides a fresh look at the Titanic’s incredible story. Following the great ship from her conception to her fateful collision to the ambitious attempts to salvage her right up to the present day, Daniel Allen Butler draws on thirty years of research to explore the tragedy and its aftermath in remarkable depth and detail.

The story of the sinking of the great liner has been told countless times since that fateful night on April 14, 1912, by historians, novelists, and film producers alike, but no account is as graphic or revealing as those from the people who were actually there.