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Patrick Swayze

Patrick Wayne Swayze (August 18, 1952 – September 14, 2009) was an American actor, dancer and singer-songwriter. He was best-known for his tough-guy roles, as romantic leading men in the hit films Dirty Dancing and Ghost and as Orry Main in the North and South television miniseries. He was named by People magazine as its “Sexiest Man Alive” in 1991. His film and TV career spanned 30 years.

Swayze’s first professional appearance was as a dancer for Disney on Parade. He starred as a replacement for Danny Zuko in the long-running Broadway production of Grease before his debut film role as “Ace” in Skatetown, U.S.A.. He appeared as Pvt. Sturgis in the M*A*S*H episode “Blood Brothers” and had a brief stint in 1982 on a short lived TV series The Renegades playing a gang leader named Bandit. Swayze became known to the film industry after appearing in The Outsiders as the older brother of C. Thomas Howell and Rob Lowe. Swayze, Howell, and Howell’s friend Darren Dalton reunited in Red Dawn  the next year, and Lowe and Swayze reunited in Youngblood. He was considered a member of the Brat Pack. His first major success was in the 1985 television miniseries North and South, which was set during the American Civil War.

Swayze’s breakthrough role came with his performance as dance instructor Johnny Castle in the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, alongside his Red Dawn co-star, Jennifer Grey. Dirty Dancing, a coming of age story set to film was a low-budget project that was intended to be shown in theaters for one weekend only and then go straight to video, but it became a surprise hit and achieved massive international success. It was the first film to sell one million copies on video, and as of 2007, has earned over $300 million worldwide and spawned several alternate versions, ranging from a television series to stage productions to a computer game. Swayze received a Golden Globe Award nomination for the role and also sang one of the songs on the soundtrack, “She’s Like the Wind”, which he had originally co-written with Stacy Widelitz for the film Grandview, U.S.A. The song became a top ten hit and has been covered by other artists.

After Dirty Dancing, Swayze found himself heavily typecast and appeared in several flops, of which Road House was the most successful. His biggest hit came in 1990, when he starred in Ghost, with Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg. In 1991, he starred alongside Youngblood cast mate Keanu Reeves in another major action hit, Point Break, and was also chosen by People magazine as that year’s “Sexiest Man Alive”.

Swayze was seriously injured in 1998 while filming HBO’s Letters from a Killer near Ione, California when he fell from a horse and hit a tree. Both of his legs were broken and he suffered four detached tendons in his shoulder. Filming was suspended for two months, but the film aired in 1999. Swayze recovered from his injuries, but he had trouble resuming his career until 2000, when he co-starred in Waking Up in Reno, with Billy Bob Thornton and Charlize Theron, and in Forever Lulu, with Melanie Griffith.

In 2001, he appeared in Donnie Darko, where he played a motivational speaker and closet pedophile, and in 2004, he played Allan Quatermain in King Solomon’s Mines. He also had a cameo appearance in the Dirty Dancing sequel, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights as an unnamed dance instructor.

Swayze made his West End theatre début in the musical Guys and Dolls as Nathan Detroit on July 27, 2006, alongside Neil Jerzak, and remained in the role until November 25, 2006. His previous appearances on the Broadway stage had included productions of Goodtime Charley (1975) and Chicago (2003).

In 2007, Swayze starred in the film Christmas in Wonderland. Swayze played an aging rock star in Powder Blue, co-starring his younger brother Don in their first film together. Swayze starred in the A&E FBI drama The Beast, filmed in Chicago, as FBI Agent Charles Barker.

Diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer in January 2008, Swayze told Barbara Walters a year later that he was “kicking it”. However, he died from the disease on September 14, 2009. His last role was the lead in an ill-fated A&E TV series, The Beast, which premiered on January 15, 2009. Due to a prolonged decline in health, Swayze was unable to promote the series. On June 15, 2009, Entertainment Tonight announced the show’s cancellation.

Recommended Reads

The Time of My Life by Patrick Swayze and Lisa Niemi

The Time of My Life by Patrick Swayze and Lisa Niemi

An entertaining and inspiring behind-the-scenes look at a Hollywood life and a remarkable love, told in the words of beloved actor Patrick Swayze and his wife, Lisa Niemi, shortly before he passed away.

In a career spanning more than thirty years, Patrick Swayze made a name for himself on the stage and screen with his versatility, passion, and fearlessness. Always a fighter, Patrick refused to let the diagnosis of stage IV pancreatic cancer in February 2008 defeat him. Patrick and Lisa’s bravery inspired legions of fans, cancer patients, and their loved ones, yet this memoir, written with wisdom and heart, recounts so much more. Revealed in vivid detail is Patrick’s Texas upbringing, his personal struggles, his rise to fame, and how his soul mate Lisa stood by his side through it all.

The Time of My Life opens the door for families, individuals, and husbands and wives to grow, bond, and discover entirely new levels of love and sharing, proving that life shouldn’t be lived as a series of endings, but rather as the beginning of greater strength and love.

James Clavell

James Clavell, born Charles Edmund Dumaresq Clavell (10 October 1924 – 7 September 1994) was a British (later naturalized American) novelist, screenwriter, director and World War II veteran and prisoner of war. Clavell is best known for his epic Asian Saga series of novels and their televised adaptations, along with such films as The Great Escape and To Sir, with Love.

Born in Australia, Clavell was the son of Commander Richard Clavell, a British Royal Navy officer who was stationed in Australia on secondment from the Royal Navy to the Royal Australian Navy. In 1940, when Clavell finished his secondary schooling at Portsmouth Grammar School, he joined the Royal Artillery to follow his family tradition.

Following the outbreak of World War II, at the age of 16 he joined the Royal Artillery in 1940, and was sent to Malaya to fight the Japanese. Wounded by machine-gun fire, he was eventually captured and sent to a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp on Java. Later he was transferred to Changi Prison in Singapore.

Clavell suffered greatly at the hands of his Japanese captors. Changi was notorious for its poor living conditions, and according to the introduction to King Rat, written by Clavell, over 90% of the prisoners who entered Changi never walked out—although the actual mortality rate was under 1%. Clavell was reportedly saved, along with an entire battalion, by an American prisoner of war who later became the model for “The King” in Clavell’s King Rat.

By 1946, Clavell had risen to the rank of Captain, but a motorcycle accident ended his military career. He enrolled at the University of Birmingham, where he met April Stride, an actress, whom he married in 1951.

Clavell’s first novel, King Rat, was a semi-fictional account of his prison experiences at Changi. When the book was published in 1962, it became an immediate best-seller and three years later, it was adapted for film. His next novel, Tai-Pan, was a fictional account of Jardine-Matheson’s rise to prominence in Hong Kong, as told through the character who was to become Clavell’s heroic archetype, Dirk Struan. Struan’s descendants would inhabit almost all of his forthcoming books.

This was followed by Shōgun in 1975, the story of an English navigator set in 1600s Japan, based on that of William Adams. When the story was made into a TV series in 1980, produced by Clavell, it became the second highest rated mini-series in history with an audience of over 120 million. In 1981, Clavell published his fourth novel, Noble House, which became a number one best seller during that year and was also made into a miniseries. Following the success of Noble House, Clavell wrote Whirlwind (1986) and Gai-Jin (1993) along with The Children’s Story (1981) and Thrump-o-moto (1985).

Frederick Forsyth, CBE (born 25 August 1938) is an English author and occasional political commentator. He is best known for thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Fourth Protocol, The Dogs of War, The Devil’s Alternative, The Fist of God, Icon, The Veteran, Avenger, The Afghan. His latest novel, The Cobra, is set to be published in late summer 2010.

The son of a furrier, Forsyth was born in Ashford, Kent. He was educated at Tonbridge School and later attended the University of Granada in Spain. He became one of the youngest pilots in the Royal Air Force at the age of 19, where he served on National Service from 1956 to 1958. Becoming a journalist, he joined Reuters in 1961 and later the BBC in 1965, where he served as an assistant diplomatic correspondent. From July to September 1967, he served as a correspondent covering the Nigerian Civil War between the region of Biafra and Nigeria. He left the BBC in 1968 after controversy arose over his alleged bias towards the Biafran cause and accusations that he falsified segments of his reports. Returning to Biafra as a freelance reporter, Forsyth wrote his first book, The Biafra Story in 1969.

Forsyth is a Eurosceptic Conservative. He is Patron of Better Off Out, an organisation calling for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. In 2003, he was awarded the One of Us Award from the Conservative Way Forward group for his services to the Conservative movement in Britain. He is also a patron of the Young Britons’ Foundation. In 2005, he came out in opposition to Kenneth Clarke’s candidacy for the leadership of the Conservative Party, calling Clarke’s record in government “unrivalled; a record of failure which at every level has never been matched”. Instead, he endorsed and donated money to David Davis’s campaign.

He is a strong supporter of the British monarchy. In his book Icon, he recommended a constitutional monarchy as a solution to Russia’s political problems following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

He is an occasional radio broadcaster on political issues, and has also written for newspapers throughout his career, including a weekly page in the Daily Express. In 2003, he criticised “gay-bashers in the churches” in The Guardian newspaper. He has narrated several documentaries, including Jesus Christ Airlines, Soldiers, a history of men in battle and I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life & Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal.

In August 2006, Forsyth appeared on the ITV gameshow Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? to raise funds for charity. On 8 February 2007, Forsyth appeared on BBC’s political panel show Question Time. On it, he expressed scepticism on the subject of anthropogenic climate change. On 26 March 2008, he also appeared on BBC’s The One Show. On 17 June 2008, Forsyth was interviewed on BBC Radio 5 Live Midday News in relation to the restoration of the Military Covenant. During the interview he referred to Gordon Brown as a numpty.

Natascha Kampusch

Natascha Kampusch (born 17 February 1988 in Vienna) is an Austrian  television host mostly known for her abduction at the age of 10 on 2 March 1998. Natascha was held in a secret cellar by her kidnapper Wolfgang Priklopil for more than eight years, until she escaped on 23 August 2006. The media attention later led to her signing a contract with Austrian channel Puls 4 for her own talk show. The show had its premiere on 1 June 2008.

Natascha Kampusch (10 years old)

Kampusch was raised by her mother Brigitta Sirny (nee Kampusch) and her father Ludwig Koch, in Vienna, Austria. Her early life with her mother was reportedly not a happy one, and Ludwig Adamovich, head of a special commission looking into possible police failures in the investigation of the kidnapping, claimed that “the time Kampusch was imprisoned might have been better for her than what she experienced before”. Her family included two adult sisters, and five nieces and nephews. Sirny and Koch separated while Kampusch was still a child. Kampusch spent time with both of them, and had returned to her mother’s home from a holiday with Koch the day before her kidnapping.

The 10-year-old Kampusch left her family’s residence in Vienna’s Donaustadt district on 2 March 1998 for school, but failed to arrive at school or come home. A 12-year-old witness reported having seen her being dragged into a white minibus by two men, although Kampusch did not report a second man being present. A massive police effort followed, and 776 minivans were examined, including that of Priklopil, who lived about half an hour from Vienna by car in the Lower Austrian town of Strasshof an der Nordbahn, near Gänserndorf. Although he stated that on the morning of the kidnapping he was alone at home, the police were satisfied with his explanation that he was using the minibus to transport rubble from the construction of his home.

Speculations of child pornography rings or organ theft were offered, and officials also investigated possible links to the crimes of the French serial killer Michel Fourniret. Kampusch had carried her passport with her when she left (she had been on a family trip to Hungary a few days before) and the police extended the search abroad. Accusations against Kampusch’s family complicated the issue even more; there have even been unsubstantiated allegations that Natascha’s mother was somehow involved in the abduction or its cover-up.

In her official statement she said “I don’t want and will not answer any questions about personal or intimate details”.

In the documentary, “Natascha Kampusch: 3096 days in captivity”, Kampusch sympathized with her captor. She said “I feel more and more sorry for him – he’s a poor soul”, in spite of having been held captive for eight years by him, and according to police she “cried inconsolably” when she was told he was dead, and lit a candle for him at the morgue. She has, however, referred to her captor as a “criminal”.

There is also speculation that Kampusch may have Stockholm syndrome as a result of her ordeal. She said “my youth was very different. But I was also spared a lot of things – I did not start smoking or drinking and I did not hang out in bad company”.

During her first interview, Christoph Feurstein asked her if she had been lonely during captivity. Kampusch snapped “what a ridiculous question” and left the room, returning after a brief pause.

In 2009 Kampusch became the new face of animal rights group PETA in Austria. In June Kampusch wrote to Ilse Aigner, agriculture minister in Germany where the campaign is based, demanding freedom for zoo animals, stating: “The animals would, if they could, flee as I did, because a life in captivity is a life full of deprivation, It is up to you whether social, intelligent and wonderful creatures are to be freed from their chains and cages where ruthless people keep them.”

In January 2009, Vienna’s public prosecutor stated that DNA tests and questioning of witnesses had led to theories being discounted that Wolfgang Priklopil had an accomplice. Natascha Kampusch has also maintained that her captor acted alone.

Girl in the Cellar: The Natascha Kampusch Story

Girl in the Cellar by Allan Hall and Michael Leidig

Eight years of darkness

On March 2, 1998, while on her way to school, ten-year-old Natascha Kampusch was abducted. More than eight years later, on August 23, 2006, she escaped with a story that shocked and horrified the entire world. She spent the most delicate years of her life hidden in a cellar underneath an ordinary Austrian suburban home. How was she able to survive? What sort of woman had emerged? What kind of man was Wolfgang Priklopil, her abductor—and what demands had he made of her?

Journalists Allan Hall and Michael Leidig covered Natascha’s story from the beginning. The result of extraordinary investigative reporting, Girl in the Cellar gets to the heart of this very tragic case to reveal a truth no one would have imagined.

Alfred A. Knopf

Alfred Abraham Knopf, Sr. (September 12, 1892 – August 11, 1984) was a leading American publisher of the 20th century, and founder of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.. His contemporaries included the likes of Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, and (of the previous generation) Frank Nelson Doubleday, J. Henry Harper and Henry Holt. Knopf paid special attention to the quality of printing, binding, and design in his books, and earned a reputation as a purist in both content and presentation.

Asked how to say his name, Knopf told the Literary Digest: “Sound the k: k’nupf.”

Knopf was born into a Jewish family in New York City. His father Samuel Knopf  was an advertising executive and financial consultant, his mother was Ida Japhe, and his brother Edwin H. Knopf, who worked for Alfred briefly, then became a film director and producer. Alfred attended Columbia University, where he was a pre-law student and a member of the Peithologian Society, a debating and literary club. He began to show an interest in publishing during his senior year, becoming advertising manager of an undergraduate magazine. His interest in publishing was allegedly fostered by a correspondence with British author John Galsworthy. After visiting Galsworthy in England, Knopf gave up his plans for a law career, and upon his return went into publishing.

After receiving his B.A. in 1912, Knopf worked as a clerk at Doubleday (1912–1913), then as an editorial assistant to Michael Kennerly (1914). He founded his own publishing house in 1915. The company initially emphasized European, especially Russian, literature, hence the choice of the borzoi as a colophon. At that time European literature was largely neglected by American publishers; Knopf published authors such as Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka.

Knopf also published many American authors, including H.L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, Vachel Lindsay, James M. Cain, Conrad Aiken, Dashiell Hammett, James Baldwin, John Updike, Shirley Ann Grau, and Knopf’s own favorite, Willa Cather. He often developed a personal friendship with his authors. Knopf’s personal interest in the fields of history, sociology, and science led to close friendships in the academic community with such noted historians as Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Samuel Eliot Morison. A prominent Republican until Watergate, Knopf often drew legislators into lengthy correspondence by mail.

Knopf himself was also an author. His writings include Some Random Recollections, Publishing Then and Now, Portrait of a Publisher, Blanche W. Knopf: July 30, 1894-June 4, 1966, and Sixty Photographs.

When Knopf’s son, Alfred A. Knopf, Jr., left the company in 1959 to found Atheneum Publishers[1], Alfred and Blanche became concerned about the eventual fate of their publishing house, which had always been a family business. The problem was solved in 1960, when Knopf merged with Random House, which was owned by the Knopf’s close friends Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. Knopf retained complete editorial control for five years, and then gave up only his right to veto other editors’ manuscript selections. The editorial departments of the two companies remain separate, and Knopf, Inc., retains its distinctive character. Knopf called the merger “a perfect marriage”.

Random House itself eventually became a division of Bertelsmann AG, a large multinational media company. The Knopf imprint remains in existence.

Blanche Knopf died in June 1966. Alfred remarried in April of the following year, to Helen Norcross Hedrick. He died of congestive heart failure on August 11, 1984, at his estate in Purchase, New York.

The Ghost Festival also known as the Hungry Ghost Festival  is a traditional Chinese festival  and holiday  celebrated by Chinese in many countries. In the Chinese calendar (a lunisolar calendar), the Ghost Festival is on the 15th night of the seventh lunar month (14th in southern China).

In Chinese tradition, the fifteenth day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar is called Ghost Day and the seventh month in general is regarded as the Ghost Month, in which ghosts and spirits, including those of the deceased ancestors, come out from the lower realm. Distinct from both the Qingming Festival (in Spring) and Chung Yeung Festival (in Autumn) in which living descendants pay homage to their deceased ancestors, on Ghost Day, the deceased are believed to visit the living.

On the fifteenth day the realms of Heaven and Hell and the realm of the living are open and both Taoists and Buddhists would perform rituals to transmute and absolve the sufferings of the deceased. Intrinsic to the Ghost Month is ancestor worship, where traditionally the filial piety of descendants extends to their ancestors even after their deaths. Activities during the month would include preparing ritualistic food offerings, burning incense, and burning joss paper, a papier-mache form of material items such as clothes, gold and other fine goods for the visiting spirits of the ancestors. Elaborate meals (often vegetarian meals) would be served with empty seats for each of the deceased in the family treating the deceased as if they are still living. Ancestor worship is what distinguishes Qingming Festival from Ghost Festival because the latter includes paying respects to all deceased, including the same and younger generations, while the former only includes older generations. Other festivities may include, buying and releasing miniature paper boats and lanterns on water, which signifies giving directions to the lost ghosts and spirits of the ancestors and other deities.

The Ghost Festival in Malaysia is modernized by the ‘concert-like’ live performances. It has its own characteristics and is not similar to other Ghost Festivals in other countries. The live show is popularly known as ‘Koh-tai’ by the Hokkien-speaking people, performed by a group of singers, dancers and entertainers on a temporary stage that setup within the residential district. The festival is funded by the residents of each individual residential districts.

Recommended Books

The Hungry Ghosts by Anne Berry

Raped then murdered in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong in 1942, Lin Shui’s ‘Hungry Ghost’ clings tenaciously to life. Holing up in a hospital morgue, which is destined to become a school, just in time she finds a host off whom to feed. It is twelve-year-old Alice Safford, the deeply-troubled daughter of a leading figure in government. The parasitic ghost follows her to her home on the Peak. There, the lethal mix of the two, embroiled in the family’s web of dark secrets and desperate lies, unleashes chaos. All this unfolds against a background of colonial unrest, riots, extremes of weather and the countdown to the return of the colony to China. As successive tragedies engulf Alice, her ghostly entourage swells alarmingly. She flees to England, then France, in a bid to escape the past, only to find her portable ‘Hungry Ghosts’ have accompanied her. It seems the peace she longs for is to prove far more elusive that she could ever have imagined.

The Hungry Ghosts is a remarkable tour de force of the imagination, full of instantly memorable characters whose lives intermesh and boil over in a cauldron of domestic mayhem, unleashing unworldly spirits into the troubled air.

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Mate

Based on Gabor Mate’s two decades of experience as a medical doctor and his groundbreaking work with the severely addicted on Vancouver’s skid row, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts radically reenvisions this much misunderstood field by taking a holistic approach. Dr. Mate presents addiction not as a discrete phenomenon confined to an unfortunate or weak-willed few, but as a continuum that runs throughout (and perhaps underpins) our society; not a medical “condition” distinct from the lives it affects, rather the result of a complex interplay among personal history, emotional, and neurological development, brain chemistry, and the drugs (and behaviors) of addiction. Simplifying a wide array of brain and addiction research findings from around the globe, the book avoids glib self-help remedies, instead promoting a thorough and compassionate self-understanding as the first key to healing and wellness.

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts argues persuasively against contemporary health, social, and criminal justice policies toward addiction and those impacted by it. The mix of personal stories—including the author’s candid discussion of his own “high-status” addictive tendencies—and science with positive solutions makes the book equally useful for lay readers and professionals.

Festival Of Hungry Ghosts by Hugh Hickling

Festival of Hungry Ghosts is concerned with the lives of those engaged in administering a small British Colony in the Far East. The Governor and his Councillors are brilliantly depicted as men committed to maintaining a status quo, yet inwardly aware that the phase of history they represent is fast drawing to a close.

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

The Diary of a Young Girl is a book based on the writings from a Dutch language diary written by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944 and Anne Frank ultimately died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After the war, the diary was retrieved by Anne’s father, Otto Frank, the only survivor of the family. The diary has now been published in more than 60 different languages.

First published under the title Het Achterhuis: Dagboekbrieven van 12 Juni 1942 – 1 Augustus 1944 (The Annex: diary notes from 12 June 1942 – 1 August 1944) by Contact Publishing in Amsterdam on 25 June 1947, it received widespread critical and popular attention on the appearance of its English language translation Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Doubleday & Company (United States) and Valentine Mitchell (United Kingdom) in 1952. Its popularity inspired the 1955 play The Diary of Anne Frank by the screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, which they subsequently adapted for the screen for the 1959 movie version. The book is in several lists of the top books of the twentieth century.

Anne Frank

Anne Frank

Annelies Marie “Anne” Frank; 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt am Main – early March 1945 in Bergen Belsen) is one of the most renowned and most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Acknowledged for the quality of her writing, her diary has become one of the world’s most widely read books, and has been the basis for several plays and films.

Born in the city of Frankfurt am Main in Weimar Germany, she lived most of her life in or near Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. By nationality, she was officially considered a German until 1941, when she lost her nationality owing to the anti-Semitic policies of Nazi Germany. She gained international fame posthumously following the publication of her diary which documents her experiences hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.

The Frank family moved from Germany to Amsterdam in 1933, the same year as the Nazis gained power in Germany. By the beginning of 1940 they were trapped in Amsterdam due to the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, the family went into hiding in the hidden rooms of her father Otto Frank’s office building. After two years, the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps. Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were eventually transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where they both died of typhus in March 1945.

Otto Frank, the only survivor of the family, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that her diary had been saved, and his efforts led to its publication on 25 June 1947. It was translated from its original Dutch and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl. It has since been translated into many languages. The diary, which was given to Anne on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life from 12 June 1942 until 1 August 1944.

Titanic

The RMS Titanic was an Olympic-class passenger liner owned by the White Star Line and was built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, in what is now Northern Ireland. At the time of her construction, she was the largest passenger steamship in the world.

Shortly before midnight on 14 April 1912, four days into the ship’s maiden voyage, Titanic struck an iceberg and sank two hours and forty minutes later, early on 15 April 1912. The sinking resulted in the deaths of 1,517 of the 2,223 people on board, making it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history. The high casualty rate was due in part to the fact that, although complying with the regulations of the time, the ship did not carry enough lifeboats for everyone aboard. The ship had a total lifeboat capacity of 1,178 people, although her maximum capacity was 3,547. A disproportionate number of men died due to the women and children first protocol that was followed.

The Titanic was designed by some of the most experienced engineers, and used some of the most advanced technologies available at the time. It was popularly believed to have been unsinkable. It was a great shock to many that, despite the extensive safety features, the Titanic sank. The frenzy on the part of the media about Titanic’s famous victims, the legends about the sinking, the resulting changes to maritime law, and the discovery of the wreck have contributed to the continuing interest in, and notoriety of, the Titanic.

14 April 2010 marked the 98th anniversary of the tragic RMS Titanic incident.

The New York Herold Report

The New York Times Report

Titanic’s Last Secrets

Titanic's Last Secrets by Brad Matsen

After rewriting history with their discovery of a Nazi U-boat off the coast of New Jersey, legendary divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler decided to investigate the great enduring mystery of history’s most notorious shipwreck: Why did Titanic sink as quickly as it did?

To answer the question, Chatterton and Kohler assemble a team of experts to explore Titanic, study its engineering, and dive to the wreck of its sister ship, Brittanic, where Titanic’s last secrets may be revealed.

Titanic’s Last Secrets is a rollercoaster ride through the shipbuilding history, the transatlantic luxury liner business, and shipwreck forensics. Chatterton and Kohler weave their way through a labyrinth of clues to discover that Titanic was not the strong, heroic ship the world thought she was and that the men who built her covered up her flaws when disaster struck. If Titanic had remained afloat for just two hours longer than she did, more than two thousand people would have lived instead of died, and the myth of the great ship would be one of rescue instead of tragedy.

Titanic’s Last Secrets is the never-before-told story of the Ship of Dreams, a contemporary adventure that solves a historical mystery.