Dead in the Water

Millions of people trust Caitlin Doughty to explore dark subjects with empathy and humor. Now, in her most ambitious work to date, Doughty explains what actually happened to the 1,500 people who died the night of history’s most famous shipwreck. Alongside white-knuckle tales of survival and mass death during the disaster, Doughty foregrounds the haunting stories of lesser-known victims, profiles the telegraph-cable-repairmen–turned–seafaring-undertakers who pulled the floating bodies from the wreck site in the North Atlantic, and explores how a salvage company came to control the human artifacts—shoes, hairbrushes—carried and worn by the dead passengers and crew. Along the way she shares the surprising science of death at sea, and how the Titanic tragedy led to mass casualty protocols still used today. The first book of its kind on one of the most famous events in human history, Dead in the Water explores how we face the void and accept (or refuse to accept) death in extreme conditions.