For the survivors of the Titanic, decisions made in seconds led to lifetimes of consequences. Get on a lifeboat? Ignore “women and children first”? Stay on the ship with a spouse? Try to rescue others or get away from the sinking and still-dangerous ship as soon as possible? Shadow of the Titanic: The Extraordinary Stories of Those Who Survived (Atria Books, 416 pp.) is a masterly account of what happened next. While he’s a bit heavy on psychoanalysis, Andrew Wilson vividly chronicles how the sinking of the Titanic contributed to fame and madness, sometimes in a single person. Wilson tracks the fates of Titanic survivors all the way to the year 2009, when the last survivor, a “tough old bird,” died just three years shy of 100. Actually, he goes a bit beyond that. He finds that the grandson of one survivor married the great-great-granddaughter of another survivor. They didn’t learn of the double connection until they’d been married for years. Their young son’s name is Jack, just like his great-grandfather and just like the hero played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the second-biggest movie blockbuster of all time. These three Jacks – a blend of myth and reality, past and future, tragedy and hope – are fine emblems of why we still care about that long-ago night full of icebergs and egos, heroes and villains, and a tragedy for the ages.
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.
