The Birth of the Titanic

Gordon Turner is the author of Empress of Britain: Canadian Pacific’s
Greatest Ship and the editor of SeaFare, a quarterly newsletter on sea
travel.

Titanic mania did not fade away after the movie was released. On the
contrary, it increased, as evidenced by the 50 or more Titanic-related
books that have been published in the last few years. The Birth of the
Titanic tries to distance itself from the competition by concentrating
on the ship’s construction rather than on its well-documented sinking.
The author, a curator at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, had
access to a remarkable collection of photographs (many from Harland &
Wolff, the ship’s builder). His smoothly written text gives a succinct
account of Titanic’s building and places Titanic in the social context
of Northern Ireland in the years preceding World War I. The core of the
book, however, is its excellent black-and-white illustrations, a fair
number of which depict the Olympic, the first of the three sister ships
(the last was Britannic).