The Titanic – “a small world bent on pleasure,” as one high-class passenger put it – was home to more than its share of lies, secrets, and myths even before it reached that iceberg in the Atlantic. The greatest untruth, of course, was that the ship could not sink. But plenty of passengers were concealing lies of their own. The friendly card player across the table might be a cheat. That striking young film star – famous because of a magazine cover artist’s ability to fudge her looks – had a married paramour back home. And it seems that several passengers, possibly including a “dandified” famous aide to President Taft, were secretly or not-so-secretly gay. The greatest ship-borne collection of celebrities of its time could produce quite the craven and sensational tell-all book. But Hugh Brewster, an author who lives in Toronto, stays classy in the delicious, wonderfully readable Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their World (Crown Publishing, 352 pp.), Brewster is unabashedly intrigued by the rich and their sometimes wicked ways. But he also has a noble motive: to “convey anew the poignance of this epochal disaster.” He manages to do just that by spending half the book on the events before the ship met the iceberg, allowing us to meet and appreciate the very most upper-crust, warts and all.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
