webster was selected. >> the formal dedication ceremony for the kennedy institute for the u.s. senate is tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. ♪ >>this week on "q&a", our guest is eric larson, out with his new book, "dead wake: the last crossing of the lusitania". the ship was downed in 1915 on route to liverpool, england. with over 2000 passengers and crew on board. brian: erik larson, your new book, "dead wake" you start off first sentence on the night of , may 6, 1915 as the ship approaches ireland, captain william thomas turner makes his

way toward the lounge. what are you talking about? erik: this was the night before the lusitania was torpedoed. the next day, the ship was going to enter the so-called zone of war declared by the german navy. the water surrounding the u.k. had been designated as a zone of war. the night before, captain turner was going into the lounge to talk to passengers during the intermission for the nightly talent show, one of the features of transatlantic voyages. he had some sobering news, but also some comforting news. he wanted to, first let everyone know that they were entering the war zone the next day, but the good news was that he said that

they would be comfortably under the protection of the british navy. the royal navy. brian: and where they? erik: no, it turns out they weren't at all. brian: and this is 1915? what is going on in the world? erik: what is going on in the world is war. america is not in the war. the war broke out in august of 1914 and very quickly the war has proven to the world that it is going to be a very different sort of war that anything that came before. it had already come to involve civilians. the german army executed civilians in belgium. there were air raids over

britain and shellings of coastal towns by the german navy. things were darkening and changing. poison gas had been used -- lethal poison gas had been used for the first time on the battlefield. in washington, we had president wilson, very much a lonely grieving man. he is lost his wife of many years in august of 1914. throughout the rest of 1914, he was deeply troubled. but by may he is head over heels was deeply troubled. but by may he is head over heels in love with a woman named edith. a 40-something widow in

washington d.c. it is not clear yet whether she is going to fall in love with him back. he is writing passionate love letters to her by the dozens at this point. this is the context, war and passion. brian: you start out by saying this -- "i first started reading about the lusitania on a whim." erik: when i look for the next idea, it is always a difficult time. a good friend of mine coined a term to describe it, she says that is when i am in the dark country of no ideas. when i am in that country, i always try to just read. if something occurs to me i will start looking into it. the lusitania had always been on my back burner, but i had always been reluctant to think about doing a book about it because it seems to me it is almost like, too obvious a story, too much low hanging fruit.

a lot of times i want an idea that is fresh enough that i can be sure there will be competition from another writer. but i had a thing about maritime history. i think we all have this romantic, i don't know what you would call it, kind of jungian archetypal need for maritime romance. i don't know. it was something that intriguted \it was something that intriguted me. i was intrigued, i didn't know anything about the lusitania. i started reading because i had nothing else on my plate. as soon as i started reading i thought this is interesting. the how's of what happened, the actual sinking of the ship.

one of the details the first details that caught my attention was when i read that during the sinking, one fully loaded lifeboat fell on top of another fully loaded lifeboat. it opened my eyes to the fact that this is what the story is it is about this human disaster. it is not the geopolitical thing that we learn about in high school. i don't know about you, but when i was in high school i learned about the lusitania sort of on a timeline leading up to world war i. something you know that occurred within you forgot about it, you moved on to the start of the war and so forth. so i started to read about it and i was discouraged by the fact that it seemed too obvious and also because there had been a lot done before. but, i realized five years ago that the 100 year anniversary -- was coming -- which of course is going to be in may of 2015. as a rule, i am very skeptical of tying books to anniversaries. i don't think readers care and i think it pretty much guarantees someone else will be writing on the subject. but as a former journalist, i

think about, why write something today, why do it now? it may have tipped to the scale to work doing a little bit more exploration. while i was in seattle, i made a stop down in stanford which had a good amount of archival materials. it was there that two things happened. one, i got a glimpse of the fact that there was this really rich, lush, archival trove of material. things that had not existed in that kind of quantity for any of my previous books. second thing that happened, i was sitting at a table in this archive and one of the archivists came over and set a plank of wood down right next to me.

on this plank was branded the name lusitania and this was a shard of a lifeboat that had been found on the irish coast on a beach next to the corpse of a dead lusitania passenger. it had made its way to the hoover institution and here it was on this table next to me. i always look for that kind of sign. i don't mean in a hocus-pocus or spooky afterlife way. what i mean is there is something about having a tactile connection to the past. i took that as a sign to keep this going and continue looking into this. and one thing led to another and suddenly i was embarked on this journey. what i found was that indeed there was such an amazing amount of original archival stuff that it would present me with an opportunity to do something that i had not, in my view, been able to achieve previously.

it was to put on my offered hitchcock had and make this as suspenseful a work of nonfiction as i could possibly do. that's why i took this book, it was an exercise in suspense. brian: we are going to do about two minutes of this. [silence] brian: when did you do this? erik: i was with my wife aboard the queen mary two this past 2015.

this was my second voyage on the queen mary ii. i wanted to get a sense of what it was like to actually crossed the ocean on a ship. , something i really thought i needed to understand. the first one was in a force 10 gale for three days. the second one was for about six to 10 days. it was stunning ferocity in the sea. the ship, i may say, was very stable. brian: if you look at the horizon, it doesn't move much. erik: this is a stable platform.

brian: same company? erik: same company. different ownership now. the old archival records from the cunard ship company were separated from them. brian: what did you learn from being out there? erik: i always say to go to the scene of the crime, if you will. being on a ship in the middle of the ocean -- you can think about it, i think you understand before you sail. there is nothing like being out there and realizing that it would be hours and hours before anyone can come to help you. i realize other things. for example, when you are in the middle of the ocean you can't smell the ocean. we are used to go to the beach and having beachy smells, but you can't smell it because there is nothing generating odor.

it is sort of an empty scent. you don't smell the things that we associate with the sea. where the sea forms a boundary with the land. you don't smell that in the middle of the ocean. the other thing that was really striking, and this is relative to the story at hand, is that today whenever you sail on a cunard ship, before it leaves the dock, you have to muster your emergency station and you have to put on your life jacket and then they give the ok to take it off. so important. i can't tell you how when you put that thing on it becomes very real, the potential threat.

what can happen to you when you are the middle the ocean if there is a problem. why that is relevant, in the case of the lusitania, there was no requirement and that had catastrophic results for many passengers. brian: it cruises for how many days? where did it leave from? where was it heading? erik: we have to be very careful about our terminology. cunard is very adamant about this today, it is a voyage. it was bound for liverpool. ordinarily, with the lusitania it would have been a five-day crossing.

five days was a remarkable achievement in that time. but there was one aspect that proved to be unfortunate which was that cunard, a cost-saving measure, had shut down one of the boiler rooms on the ship. one of the four. brian: one of those stacks we are seeing? erik: each one of those finals came from the boiler room below. so one of the boiler rooms wasn't functioning which extended the trip and became very relevant for what occurred. brian: one of the things that you mention in the book is the history of coal and the impact that cole had on this whole trip. erik: yeah, it is one of the things i found very striking. outwardly, the ship is this beautiful thing.

it is clean lines, huge, glamorous, the whole deal. inside, amazingly labor-intensive with vast amounts of coal stored in the ship along longitudinal coal larders. the reason these were significant -- by the way, 6000 tons of coal for this voyage. the reason why these longitudinal bunkers were important was because they were an artifact of the original deal with the british government to allow the ship to be built. the government specified that it

wanted certain requirements. the ship had to be fast, had to be able to do 25 knots. it maxed -- actually 24 and three quarters knots. and it had to be built in battlefield specifications. coal was thought to be the equivalent of armor in a ship. the british government wanted to be able to use it as an armed auxiliary cruiser and about guns if they needed to. a significant amount of armament. so the ship was essentially a glamorous ocean liner but with the whole configuration and coal storage configuration of a battleship.

it consumed about 1000 tons of coal per day through the course of a voyage. tremendously labor-intensive. 300 firemen at a time dealing with these things. brian: how do you correctly pronounce the name of the u-boat captain? erik: the german is capitan schwieger. brian: here is a picture of him. tell us about his role. erik: going into this project i thought we have the villain here. -- villian hero.

as i started doing research into him and the submarine and so forth, i found that i was growing increasingly sympathetic to him. he was a young guy, 30 well-liked by his crew, humane. at one point he had six dogs -- dachsunds -- aboard his ship, four of which were puppies. a colleague of his, a fellow submarine captain, said of him after the war that he wouldn't hurt a fly. this patrol that he set out on -- and i have to emphasize, he was not in any point stalking the lusitania per se. he was not after the lusitania

that is a common misconception. he was assigned to hunt troop transports in a certain location. but this voyage that he set out on -- this patrol, in his case proved to be filled with mishaps and bad weather. i have heard from readers already that they found themselves rooting for captain schweiger. i didn't necessarily intend that but -- i don't believe in heroes, every hero has warts in every villain has potentially good qualities. except adolf hitler, i make an exclusion for him. brian: in his career, how many ships did he blow up? erik: i cannot recall the specific number, but he was already, even at this point, one of germany's submarine aces. he was one of the few in the german submarine service who had actually been in the service before the war began. so he was already very

experienced. he was clearly adept, he was an ace, and he was one of the most valued members of the service. brian: let's take a look at captain turner. erik: captain william thomas turner, he is the kind of guy that if you boarded the lusitania and you had any anxiety, you would look at captain turner and you would most likely feel that anxiety start to slip away. the kind of guy you would want as a captain. as a captain. he looked fit, he looked strong, he looked like a man of substance. he is someone who rode through the captain ranks. he had been a cabin boy at the age of eight and worked his way up to become one of cunard's top captain's.

s. at this point it was his third stint as captain of the lusitania. they rotated captain's as they do today. brian: how many people on board? erik: another thing given the. period, had a full passenger load. and a record number of children. brian: going back to the submarine, how many did they roughly have? erik: 36 people. and six dogs. the dogs were not important at this point. brian: one of the things that popped out to me was when he

said that in those days there was no sonar. so this u-boat could sit on the bottom of the ocean and nobody would know they were there. what role did that play? erik: another thing to throw into the mix first was that there was no sonar which is of course the classic trope for anyone who is seen world war ii submarine films, but there are also no depth charges. that will come much later in the war. the submarine was able to sit on the bottom in certain circumstances. it had to be in water that was not too terribly deep because otherwise the pressures would destroy the hull. this was significant because strangely enough, a world war i submarine was not particularly good at staying underwater. it could go underwater and was a lethal weapon when it was, but it couldn't stay under that long

and could not travel that fast. maximum speed underwater was 9 knots. one way would have been to sit on the bottom of sandy water in the north sea. a submarine had to keep moving and if it was being dogged by destroyers the whole time, which happened on this patrol, it didn't have the option of just stopping and nesting on the bottom and waiting. it had to keep moving. the problem was limited range, \and when they reach the end of that range, they had to recharge and there was no other option. imagine being followed by destroyers and you are traveling along at your maximum undersea speed of nine knots, your batteries are -- these were electric engines underwater, diesel on the surface.

imagine you are running underwater and your batteries are strained and beginning to crack. schweiger notes in his war log that had the destroyers continued their pursuit, they would've had a problem potentially fatal. brian: where did you go to find the most information on captain schweiger? erik: one of the main places was in london at the archives. also significant pieces at churchill college and the churchill archives at cambridge. but one of the main troves was the archives of the united kingdom. i came across a large collection of british naval intelligence reports which were compilations and narratives based on interrogations of captured submariners, captured german submarine crews, in which the

british naval intelligence analysts or whoever is doing the questioning asked them about their patrols, about how submarines worked, about what the tactics were, but also after them about what other commanders were like, what other crews were like. this was fascinating to me because it showed that there was no one type of german submarine commander. there was a very interesting span from absolutely ruthless to very humane and kind of lazy. one guy was notorious for being a lousy shot. he eventually got transferred out.

but there is also a lot of comment about schweiger in those things. there were a lot of other -- there was a ledger actually that tracked each one of these patrols just based on something we haven't gotten to but the ability of the british navy to intercept and decode german communications for most of the war.

brian: you are talking about room 40? room 40 was where? erik: room 40 of the old admiralty building. brian: what did they mean by admiralty? erik: the people running the british navy. the first lord was winston churchill. the first sealord was jackie fisher. what is significant there is that jackie fisher was supposed to be the day-to-day operating guy and churchill was supposed to be the ceo. but churchill is not going to take anything less than an intrusive role in the management of whatever he is managing.

so a lot of conflict. brian: you pointed out the churchill was 40 and jackie was 74. let me point out something you put on page 190. this is a lot to pay. how many americans lost their lives on this? erik: 128. brian: how many people didn't survive? erik: 1200. brian: how many people did survive? erik: about 700. there is no doubt that churchill would have welcomed that

incident to get america into the war early. he had written a note to the head of the board of trade saying that we mean the traffic from america and if some of it gets trouble, all the better. the story gets complicated when the question arises as to, what ultimately happened to the lusitania? why was the lusitania allowed to enter the irish sea without escort, without the kind of detailed warnings that could have been provided to captain william thomas turner but was not? this has led to some very interesting speculation about was the ship essentially set up for attack by churchill or someone in the admiralty. it is interesting, i found no smoking memo and i would have found a smoking memo if it existed. there was nothing from churchill to jackie fisher or to someone

else in the admiralty saying let's let the lusitania go into this has led to some very interesting speculation about was the ship essentially set up for attack by churchill or someone in the admiralty. it is interesting, i found no smoking memo and i would have found a smoking memo if it existed. there was nothing from churchill to jackie fisher or to someone else in the admiralty saying, let's let the lusitania go into the irish sea because we want it to get sunk. however, there is a collection of evidence that if you try to use that evidence to prove that there was a conspiracy, you couldn't. but if you flip it around and pursue the null hypothesis, and try to prove that there was no conspiracy, you can't. it is the same kind of thing.

i find it very interesting that a very prominent naval historian and former british naval intelligence guy had, in a book about room 40, had said at first that his view was that lusitania was a " monumental cock-up." later in life, this gentleman was interviewed and he says that he had a change of heart. he said that, now thinking about it, he said as much as i love the royal navy, i have come to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy. he doesn't know what kind are who was behind it, but there is nothing else to explain that particular set of evidence. it is fascinating. brian: the first time we talked was your last book where through the process, you didn't want to give away the plot. so why are we jumping all over

the place? i want to get to some of the characters. theodate pope. i have a picture on the screen. who was she? and there is that museum. erik: theodate pope, i found her to be a very interesting character. she is one of the cadre of women who first embrace the term feminist, which i found interesting. feminist being a relatively new term in her day. i liked her. first of all, the main criteria for making her one of the primary characters in my book was detail. she left very detailed accounts, not just of what happened at the

end, but leading up to it. i also particularly liked her back story. she was one of america's first licensed architects as a woman. in the early 1900s, that was a big deal. she also had this very interesting -- as did many in this time, we forget this -- she had this very powerful interest in exploring what we referred to at the time as psychical events or psychical phenomenon. this sounds ludicrous today, but back then, this was an area of lively intellectual and scientific investigation. there was the society for psychical research in britain. she was one of those folks. she was a psychical investigator. she was also depressed as she went aboard the ship. and that whole story, about her depression, about how she had tried to cope with it over her

life, was very compelling. overall, her story aboard the ship is what i found very powerful.brian: she obviously survived. what happened to her with the ship was blown up? erik: so people faced a choice on the lusitania, and it was a choice that they had to make quickly because the ship sank in 18 minutes.

brian: how long did the titanic take? erik: lets set this up and then i will give the context about her. it is 2:10 in the afternoon. lunch is just finished. the ship is passing through seas that are amazingly flat and smooth. nobody has seen anything like this before. like glass, which is very rare for those waters. a warm spring day. the irish coast is visible in the distance.

the fall that was in the sea had lifted about an hour earlier almost in a miraculous fashion until it was suddenly gone. here is the ship sailing through this glassy sea, and what happens then, when schweiger launches his torpedo -- you can imagine this, a torpedo leaves a very obvious track of compressed air bubbles. this was the exhaust from the torpedo. it is a glassy sea and you think you are safe and suddenly you see this track heading right toward the ship. that is what that moment is like. there is the impact and then -- and this is what is relevant to theodate pope and others -- it opened up a hole at just the right spot. flooding was so massive and so intense that the ship almost immediately took on a 25 degree

left. so while it had more than enough lifeboats, suddenly half of the lifeboats were useless, or essentially useless. you are any 25 degree lift, the boats on the port side are now moving against the deck and the superstructure. starboard side, the boats have strung out eight to 10 feet from the hole. people are trying to span from deck chairs and things to try to get onto the boats. the fully loaded lifeboat that fell on another fully loaded lifeboat. this is not encouraging people to climb into the boats. many did try the boats, but many people did what theodate pope chose to do which was to jump into the sea. and then she had this horrendous experience lapsing into and out of consciousness. for a time being submerged. just amazing sorts of things.

brian: and she lived to 1946? erik: she lived a long life, depressed most of it. but she married an ambassador. achieve her dream of setting up a pioneering boy school in connecticut. brian: of all the scenes in the book, the one they got me was the woman who delivered a baby right there.

erik: this was a report by the son, he talks about a passenger telling him -- his mother was deeply pregnant and he had learned from another passenger that they saw his mother giving birth in the sea after jumping from the ship. brian: either one of them survive? erik: neither one of them did. brian: i want to go back to the beginning of this. captain turner, you point out, testified the day before or the day of, on the titanic? erik: he was called in as an expert witness for the limitation of liability hearings in the titanic disaster. this was the webster alliance's effort to limit the amount of

money that survivors and the next of kin could get from white star. brian: and that was 1912 when that went down? erik: that was 1912. that he was called it as an expert witness about what the captain of the titanic was doing going so fast through waters where icebergs were reported. he is a very blunt guy. he doesn't like being questioned, let alone with eight lawyers in the room. he says some remarkable things but he is also asked about the lusitania and does he feel that it has enough flotation ability

and so forth in case of a disaster. he essentially says, no ship really does. if they float, that's fine, if they sink, he gets out. it is so amazing, he did this the day before the lusitania sinks. brian: this is about an ad in the paper that morning. but before we go there, have things changed? have they figured out a better way to do the lifeboats? erik: the lifeboats are much more sophisticated now. they are self-contained pods. once you are in a lifeboat, you will have a rough ride, but you will be in a safe place. brian: how about getting in the em? erik: i didn't have to do this, but my sense is that it is much more sophisticated. it is a lot better.

brian: where did this ad that i am about to read, run? erik: it appeared the morning of the lusitania's departure in various newspapers in new york. one of them was the " new york world" where it appeared next to a cunard ad about the lusitania. it was interpreted because of this as being aimed at the lusitania. brian: that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to the british isles, that in accordance with formal notice gives by the imperial german government, travelers sailing in the war zone on ships of great britain or her allies do so at their own risk. anybody see that? erik: yes. many appeared not to appear it actually.

theodate pope saw it only after boarding the ship and seeing it on the newspaper in the lounge. can you imagine that? many did see it. only i think a couple of people canceled. and you ask yourself now, what were you thinking? but you have to put yourself in the point of view of the era and say this is a time of supreme confidence in invention.

here is the ship that is a monument to the progressive era. so fast and big, no submarine could possibly catch it. so of course they went aboard. nobody canceled and the ship set sail with 2000 souls aboard. brian: there is again some video of the ship. do you remember how long it is? erik: 775 or so feet i think. brian: and that was the biggest ship? erik: there were others that were bigger, but interestingly the british liners that were larger had been commandeered by the admiralty to become troop ships or armed auxiliary cruisers. the german ships that were bigger and faster were interned or sequestered, because the

german government did not want the british navy to get those ships. brian: we got in the war two years later. one of the footnotes in the back -- there are some very interesting footnotes. this is out of context, but just to get you to explain how you did this. i decided to footnote this because it was precisely the kind of detail that is likely to cause the reader to pause a

moment and ask him or herself, how do you know when he walked to the window's? answer, because he tells us so. what caused you to put that in there? erik: a couple of reasons. it is what is called narrative nonfiction. some writers have a tendency to take liberties and have people doing things that they don't really know that they were doing. i don't want to have somebody say, how did you know that this guy was walking over there? is that artistic license? i know this because he told us.

brian: another footnote. governors island. what moved you to do that? erik: i have spent a fair amount of time researching the path the lusitania was going to take to try to get a sense. one of the places it was going to go by with governors island. i did a little bit of research and learned that the smothers brothers were born there and it intrigued me. brian: also, for instance, there is a u-boat.net. i went to the site and found that the guy who runs the site is in reykjavik, iceland.

and the people who were involved in this, they have got the whole thing there. erik: in incredible detail. it is really one of the most incredible websites i have come across. brian: the other thing you talk about is the video. erik: i try not to watch other people's documentaries. i want to come to my own view. but it is very interesting what you see. at one point, as the ship is moving across the camera, at first you think the camera is panning, but given the technology of the era, the ship is moving. one detail that was very telling, a stewardess comes out of a door very crisply, carry

something to a passenger, and then walks back through the door. obviously bringing a telegram or whatever. i don't know why that was really meaningful. it put me briefly into the fact that these guys are setting sail and nobody is really concerned about this. and then of course in this video , there is turner on the bridge. he has got that turner smile very nice smile, and off they go. brian: you got quite a sendoff from the " new york times. " were you surprised? two reviews and according to this you got a special q and a in the review section.

erik: and a podcast. brian: i want to show you an old writer who you say is your favorite, ernest hemingway. that picture has some resemblance to somebody i'm looking at right in front me. erik: it is funny you say that because i've started hearing that for the first time. somebody actually posted on twitter side-by-side pictures of me and hemingway. i'll take it. i'm not going to do the shotgun thing but i will take it. erik: i know that hemingway has lost some and fitzgerald has risen, but what i love about hemingway is the clarity and austerity of his prose. i was drawn to that from the first moment i have read hemingway.

my favorite works of his art is short stories collected called "in our time." he is the master of the art of not telling. you know exactly what is happening even though he never tells you. i think that is genius. brian: a lot of this is small material to get in before the hour is over. you and your wife worked together on these books, how? erik: we work together in the sense that she is my best, most natural editor and reader. she is a medical doctor. but she is a fantastic editor and reader. i give her the rough draft -- i never call it the rough draft, the first draft.

that draft is so packed with things. my m.o. is to pack it with everything i can and then start editing. she is my secret weapon in that category. it took some time to get to this level. she will give it back to me, she is not allowed to say what she thinks, she just has to give it back to me with a deadpan face. this is crucial. up arrows good, down arrows goes out. sad faces bad -- smiley faces

good. sometimes a receding series of z's. this is also valuable to me because then i know what doesn't work. she has the fresh eye of a very talented reader. brian: charles lauriat, who was he? erik: charles lauriat, the reason he was in the book was detail. he left great accounts of the voyage, the sinking, and the aftermath.

anybody who was in that book as a passenger or any other character except for the obvious ones, is there because of the detail. one reason i loved it was because he was a bookseller in a time that is being referred to as the golden age of book collecting. he was the owner of a bookstore in boston. and he was famous. a bookseller, famous, can you imagine? famous and well-off enough that he could take his annual buying trip to england traveling first-class and spending months in england and then coming back with things they could sell out of his store. i love to store but i also love the fact that, strangely enough, in one filing in the national archives in washington dc, he lost some things aboard this voyage. in the sinking, he wanted to get the value back from what was the u.s. mixed claims commission. he filed this extraordinary petition.

most people file just a couple of pages asking for money back. his was around 180 pages, just filing after filing of all these things that he had brought aboard. but what was most valuable and what took me by surprise was that in these filings he talked a lot in detail about what he did before departure on the ship. that was fascinating to me. when you are doing this kind of narrative nonfiction that is something you have to have. i knew exactly what kind of suitcases he had, where and how he checked them in, where he kept these things. i don't know why he filed all this detail. brian: what it looked like

inside the ship, the lusitania that went down on may 7, 1915. when you are on queen mary ii, didn't look anything like this? erik: not so much. the queen mary was very nice but this is luxury. when you have state rooms where you can actually have a wood burning fireplace, that is a different level of glamour. brian: you talk about woodrow wilson throughout the book. one thing you enjoy writing is that the woman he was going to marry turned him down at once. erik: he was hell-bent on making her eventually come around. and that was an important part of the story. context was very important.

obviously i talk a lot about the war and the changing nature of the war to show the stakes of what was involved. and here is wilson, this poor guy. he was so deeply lonely, grieving the loss of his first wife and suddenly this woman has come into his wife and he is left almost disoriented and then the lusitania disaster happens. it had to color, even if only a little bit, his response. at one point he gave a speech in philadelphia and he said, i was just in such an emotional turmoil that i wasn't sure what city i was in. he briefly thought it was new york. brian: here we have a picture to show you where the lusitania is today. i render from your book is about 11 miles off the coast of ireland. you can find ballard on the web when he went down there to see this.

we talked about your book, "the devil in the white city," and the other one, what kind of different experience was this? erik: the research journey was amazing. i will probably never be able to equal it. much more fun for this was just the sheer delight in structuring the narrative because i had all this terrific stuff that would let me tell this story in a way that i was not able to tell other stories before. it was so -- fun is not the word

-- exhilarating, compelling. brian: i will give it away, but if you read the book you can read about what happened to captain turner and captain swiger -- captain schweiger. our guest has been erik larson. the book is called "dead wake". we thank you very much for coming on. ? [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> for free transcripts or to give us your comments, visit q&a.org. also available as podcasts.

>> marking 10 years of compelling conversations. other programs you might like include scott berg, doris kearns goodwin on her book on theodore roosevelt, william howard taft, and journalism. and, margaret mcmillan. she describes the assassination of the archduke and you can watch these any time or search the video library. >> on the communicators more from the international consumer electronics show.