Archibald Gracie (1859–1912)

This personal account from a survivor of the sinking of the Titanic was first published in 1913. More than 100 years later, it still is a chilling account of all that happened on that fateful night. Archibald Gracie recalls what he and others experienced that night in a chilling narrative. He talks about what he did, helping others load and launch the lifeboats. He talks about the poignant goodbyes, families resigned to what must be. In the latter part of the book, he recounts the facts he garnered through meticulous research, contacting other survivors, and quoting some facts that came to light through the judicial inquiries at that time. It is a fascinating, detailed, and quite account of the sinking as he himself experienced it, along with others’ accounts. This audio version was superbly performed by Frederick Davidson.… (mer)

OK, so he is not a writer, rather a retired Major General or some such... and it shows. Not only that, but his real intent it to document, as completly as possible - that is, with intermidable repetition - all that he could discover about the sinking of the Titanic, which, admittedly, he was a passenger of.

This is a very boring reading experience, and when compared to what it was about, the power of the actual event, is it only interesting because of how little has been made from how much.

There is not one single consideration of any idea bigger than the second, bigger than each individual happening, aside from direct quotes from some survivors who do manger to exhibit some insight. Our author, Archibald Gracie does not.

Avoid.

… (mer)

I have read a number of books about the Titanic recently and this is one of the famous survivor accounts by Colonel Archibald Gracie. He barely survived after being washed into the sea near the very end as he and others were trying to launch one of the collapsible lifeboats, swam up again and survived the night along with others (such as the senior surviving officer, Second Officer Charles Lightoller) clinging to the top of the upturned boat. This is a book of two distinct sections. The first third is Gracie's own dramatic account of his actions and survival during those hours. The remaining two thirds of the book consists of two very long chapters detailing all the information he had gathered from both the American and British inquests and his own enquiries about the names and accounts of survivors in each boat on both the port (his own) side of the ship in one chapter and the starboard side in the other. While valuable and very systematic, it does contain quite a lot of repetition and many of the accounts read very similarly. All the accounts, including Gracie's own, inevitably reflect some of the assumptions of the time about human behaviour, the default view that foreigners tend to lack the courage shown by true Brits and Americans, and largely passing over the fate of the steerage passengers, whose survival rate was much lower. This is a valuable collection of information that must have cost Gracie a lot of time and energy, even while he was ill during the summer of 1912 due to the strain and exhaustion of his experiences; sadly, he died in December of that year, the first survivor to pass away.… (mer)