REVIEW: FAREWELL TITANIC BY CHARLES PELLEGRINO

Farewell Titanic: Her Final Legacy by Charles Pellegrino
Hard cover
352 pages
Published March 6, 2012

Can anyone say obsessed?  I mean me -- although Mr. Pellegrino probably admittedly qualifies as well!

This book was fascinating.  Charles Pellegrino has been studying the Titanic wreck for years, and is on the team of advisors for James Cameron's movie as well as his expedition dives -- all 13 of them!

Pellegrino also was friends with Walter Lord, who wrote the 1955 classic "A Night To Remember" based on all eye witness accounts of the sinking.  This I now have downloaded on my Kindle and plan on reading it soon.  Many of the accounts in Farewell are gleaned from over two thousand pages of interviews and correspondence between the two men, so these were my favourite parts of this book.

Although I also thoroughly enjoyed the science-ey parts of it, I got a bit tired of the whole "rusticle" thing.  But that's just ME.  Oh, and the 9/11 stuff, although extremely significant to the author and the expedition team on the day of the attacks (they were at sea at the wreck at the time), it did go on a bit too long in that vein.

I had just watched Ghosts of the Abyss the documentary that James Cameron did of his 2001 dive to the wreck, (which you can watch in its entirety on youtube) and this book was centered around this particular dive, so that made it probably more interesting than if I had NOT just seen the film.

All in all a good solid read, but not in my top recommendations for Titanic reads.  What I really wanted was more of the accounts, which I had really not known, and Walter Lord's book will deliver them.

What was neat was the reference to some of the accounts and then directly referencing them with the 1997 film.  Other than the personal accounts, that was the most enjoyable for me.

RATING:  3/5