This reminded me a lot of the movie Titantic not just because it's about a disaster at sea, but also it would have been a lot shorter and better without the romantic subplot. Only in this case it was U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and Edith Bolling Galt instead of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Although I gotta admit that the scene when ole Woody sketched Edith in the nude was pretty hot..... 
 Wait. I might have mixed something up there. 
 This is part of the continuing trend of Erik Larson's books for me. He has this weird knack of being able to write something that is about 50% interesting, but the other 50% always seems like it's him stretching to tie some other kind of element to give it a hook it doesn't really need. He can't just tell us the story behind the 1893 World's Fair, he has to make half the book about a serial killer. (Some people would tell you that it's vice versa as to what's good about that one). Or instead of doing a non-fiction pop history novel about the invention of the wireless by Marconi, he had to tie it into the capture of a famous murderer of the day. Giving a day-to-day account of living in Nazi Germany wasn't good enough so he had to put half the focus on a promiscuous American woman and her boring father in Berlin. 
 So this time out we've got the sinking of the Lusitania, a fascinating historical event about which many intriguing questions remain to this day, and yet a good chunk of this book is spent detailing how President Wilson found love again after the death of his first wife. If this was a book about Wilson, or if it was some kind of deep dive into his response to the attack where knowing his mindset at the time is critical to the story, then I might understand why so much time is spent on detailing how the two of them met and how their courtship progressed. 
 However since none of those things really matter I had that that same feeling while reading that I had when watching the aforementioned Titantic: Quit falling in love and hit the damn iceberg already. (Only it's a German U-boat instead of a chunk of ice this time.) 
 As usual with the parts I actually care about Larson does a pretty decent job of creating narrative history to give us a vivid account of what life was like for the passengers and crew of the ship as well as the Germans on the submarine. He also gives us a good idea of the touchy political situation that existed between the various nations involved because of World War I. 
 He does seem to prefer doling out trivia and anecdotes rather than dealing in any meaningful way with the bigger questions of the event. The conspiracy theories about why England didn't do more to protect the ship and speculation about the what caused a secondary explosion after the torpedo hit are barely touched on, but at the same time I know what kind of wallpaper was in the reading salon on board. Or I learned that Woody and Edith ate chicken salad on their wedding night, but nothing is said about the critical role she later played in his administration after he suffered a stroke later. 
 It's not bad, but it's also a fairly shallow look that seems more interested in telling you what happened rather than really digging into the questions of how or why it did. It's like the Hollywood screenplay version of history. With romance!