The Truth About the Titanic by Archibald Gracie

Archibald Gracie survived the sinking of Titanic and gave evidence to the US Senate inquiry into the disaster. He testified that he was asleep in his cabin when Titanic collided with the iceberg and was woken by the impact.

The Truth About the Titanic is an in depth and yet haunting tale of survival on the tragic night of April 15th 1912 when the Titanic struck an iceberg and sunk into the bitter Atlantic Ocean, taking with it more than 1,500 poor souls. The author re-tells the events of that fateful night from his own perspective as well as countless other survivors that he interviewed.

Of all the Titanic books I've read over the years, this particular book gathers the most intensely detailed descriptions of that night from the actual survivors. Each perspective is overlapping as the author exhaustively plotted who was in each and every lifeboat.

From a modern perspective, knowing what we do now 100+ years later about the ship and what happened that tragic night, reading this book gives insight to how vastly different one's idea of what happened can be. The author even talks about this at several points in the book since the ship was so big, it was impossible to know what was going on elsewhere from one's own perspective. For instance, Gracie truly believed that ship went down intact despite people like Jack Thayer, that he interviewed swearing otherwise.