When Shauna Porteus, the Winnetka-Northfield Public Library District’s head of adult services, heard that last year’s audience for the One Book Two Villages events was 70 percent female, she decided it was time to change things up.
Since the program started in 2003, the chosen books have always been novels. So the staff decided it was time to try a work of narrative nonfiction. They chose “Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania,” the latest work from bestselling author Erik Larson.
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“His name has such weight,” Porteus said. “The moment he was announced, people were very excited.”
A Sept. 24 lecture/cocktail party and Sept. 25 luncheon with Larson sold out weeks in advance. (A small number of general admission, lecture-only tickets were still available at press time.)
“I live by libraries,” Larson said. “If they didn’t exist, I’d have a really hard time doing what I do.”
For instance, Larson only decided to write “Dead Wake” after perusing the archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
“I realized that the range and depth of archival sources on the Lusitania was deeper and richer than any book that I’d done,” he said.
Larson said he has been interested in maritime history since he was a child fascinated by ghost ships like the Mary Celeste and the Flying Dutchman, mysterious disappearances of vessels in the Bermuda Triangle and the sinking of the Titanic. He said he would have written a book about the Titanic if not for James Cameron’s film and was worried about tackling the sinking of the Lusitania during the lead-up to World War I because he thought it too might be overdone. He was convinced otherwise when he learned that even after the passenger ship was sunk by the German navy, killing 128 U.S. citizens, it still took America two years to enter the war in Europe.
“One of the things I discovered as I was doing my advance reading is that those who had written about it before gave short shrift to the sinking and focused on conspiracy theories and the long diplomatic drama that followed,” he said. “I realized there was an awful lot about the story that had not been told but should have been. It’s a tremendous human story, a tremendous human disaster.”
Along with following the crew and passengers on the ship and some of the decisions that led them to their eventual fate, “Dead Wake” spends a good deal of time exploring the mindset of the German U-boat captain who sank the ship.
“One nice thing was a ton of material that had been held by the Germans was liberated after the war and almost everything has been translated,” Larson said.
The book also spends plenty of time following President Woodrow Wilson, who was distracted from foreign affairs by a budding romance.
“I’m a big believer in context,” Larson said. “No event happens in a vacuum. I wanted to give a sense of what the world was like leading up to this event. I just love the idea of while this ship is headed towards its date with destiny all these other things are happening including Wilson mooning over this woman who will eventually become his wife. I think it was very, very relevant.”
Larson is currently looking for an idea for his next book, though he said he hasn’t found anything yet that “made me swoon.” Once he seizes on a topic, Larson spends three to six months working on a book proposal he can take to a publisher, who will in turn fund Larson for the two to four years it takes to flesh that proposal into a full book.
One thing Larson won’t be writing is a script for an adaptation for “The Devil in the White City.” In 2010, Leonardo DiCaprio bought the rights to make a film based on Larson’s 2003 book about a serial killer preying on visitors to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. This past August, DiCaprio formed an alliance to move the project forward with Martin Scorsese directing.
“I’m not going to have any role,” Larson said. “I don’t want a role. I’m not a film guy. I’m not a screenwriter. I’m very content to leave it to the pros.”
An Evening with Erik Larson
7:30 p.m. lecture Sept. 24
Winnetka Community House, 620 Lincoln Ave.
$15
847-446-7220; winnetkalibrary.org