Books: The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria

I tend to be obsessed with novels and documentaries about epic disasters—partly, like many people, to gawk at the sheer enormity of a catastrophic event, but mostly to find some level of personal, emotional understanding of what the people who were caught in it experienced.

The Andrea Doria was the epitome of Atlantic ocean-liner luxury in the middle of the century ... until 1956 when it was broadsided dead-on by the ice-cutting prow of the liner Stockholm in thick fog and then it slowly sank 45 miles south of Nantucket. And while The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria documents in great detail both the mechanics of the catastrophe and the harrowing stories of the passengers and crew, it does so with distracting clumsiness that's in desperate need of an editor.

There's a definite art to creating emotional, memorable relationships between a reader and even a handful of key players among the 1,100+ passengers on an ocean liner. Erik Larson (who wrote Dead Wake about the sinking of the Lusitania and is perhaps best known for writing Devil in the White City) sets the bar high with deftness, poetry and a smartly curated understanding of the human experience. Unfortunately, The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria struggles and fails to reach that bar. To wit: Chapter 2 is little more than paragraph after relentless paragraph describing the lives and backgrounds and travel purposes of 100+ people. The paragraphs are all well-researched and filled with interesting information—but they're overwhelming, and they contain so many superfluous details and tertiary names that they become a numbing blur by the time they finish plodding by.

It's this clumsy, belabored lack of editing that makes the entire book feel somewhat like a high-school paper that's padded to reach a minimum number of pages. In perhaps the most egregious example, there's a paragraph that all but dominates page 72 with an excruciatingly detailed litany of 47 foods that may or may not appear on an evening's dinner menu. Honestly, does ANYONE find useful narrative value in knowing that First Class passengers "could choose from a variety of vegetables, including potatoes (mashed, boiled, roasted, or fried), cauliflower, roasted tomatoes, or sauteéd endive"? And for all the breathless descriptions of the ship's Mid-century Italian-chic décor, there isn't a single photo of its magnificent interior among the 16 pages of photos ... two of which are just full-page stylized print ads about the ship.

All that said, if you train your eyes and brain to skim past ponderous lists of beverages and games available in First Class—and, curiously, the names of the two helicopter pilots who eventually helped rescue the passengers—this is a gripping, detailed (though again: way too detailed in places), incredibly good read. It fully delivers in telling why-and-how details of the physical destruction of the collision and the passengers' and crew members' stories of terror, survival, heroism, cowardice and every attendant emotion in between—though because of the staggering volume of character introductions in Chapter 2 it's nearly impossible to remember who people are when they meet their fates on the sinking ship.

The Andrea Doria and its sinking were the last gasps of high-style ocean travel as passenger airplanes (literally) appeared on the horizon and dramatically cut transcontinental travel time and expense. To underscore this historical importance, The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria nicely frames its narrative around the publication of A Night to Remember, which documented the sinking of the Titanic 40+ years before the Andrea Doria joined it at the bottom of the Atlantic. It's a clever, efficient way to compare and contrast both sinkings, offer historical and cultural perspective, and incorporate details of yet another epic catastrophe to keep me enthralled.