Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World by Hugh Brewster

Final Rating: 3.9/5

 All that glitters is not gold

  I cannot deny this in part was one of the better references surrounding the RMS Titanic that I have read. Its beginning chapters immediately drew me in with a narrative pairing with well-known facts, photos and collected diary and letter entries and I couldn’t be found without this edition in my hands when anyone looked over to see what I was reading. Unfortunately for me, the saying “All that glitters is not gold” can apply to this work and I wish now I paid more attention to what other crestfallen readers thought after putting this title down. It just tried to pull so many redundant sub-topics into the narrative and left me with an impression that the author may have really wanted to write about an entirely different subject. Sadly the other issues I had with Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World could be found in the odd choppy gossipy sections about certain if not all the first-class passengers this title touched on. For me those chapters were unneeded but I’m happy to report those parts only seemed to gather in the late beginning and by the later chapters this book found its course but also became slightly repetitive with how and who pertaining to the elite list of passengers and to be honest I really thought this book could have been a lot longer.

  If only those extra pages contained more descriptions and origins of the designs surrounding the magnificent private suites, stained glass windows, exclusive dining experiences and White Star Line services. I agree this may have not been entirely possible without excessive speculation because so much is known about certain details about the RMS Titanic but these finished and some unfinished areas and objects are still being strongly debated on but still when I picked up Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World, I thought this would be more about the prominent 1st class passengers’ time spent on the RMS Titanic. Negatives aside and overall, I thought this work attempted to walk around the available areas on the ship and introduced names and lives that are forever attached to that fateful voyage and the many references listed in the back pages have provided me more titles to seek out. It also had some elegantly described scenes (especially in the calm beginning and final tragic chapters) that allowed me to step aboard with one of my favorite topics to learn about and for those reasons this title will stay on my shelves. It may not come close to A Night to Remember, On a Sea of Glass: The Life and Loss of the RMS Titanic or The Night Lives On (three outstanding non-fiction works that I highly recommend to anyone and everyone) but it still has found a place of interest.

-purchased and read on nook