Pocket Books to Publish Official Transcripts of the Titanic Senate Hearings Tuesday January 27, 10:01 am Eastern Time Company Press Release

NEW YORK--(ENTERTAINMENT WIRE)--Jan. 27, 1998--Pocket Books has announced that it will publish the official transcripts of the 1912 Senate Titanic Hearings. The book is titled The Titanic Disaster: The Official Transcripts of the 1912 Senate Investigation, edited and with an introduction by Tom Kuntz, the editor of the Word for Word column at The New York Times. The Titanic Disaster will be published in mid-February as a mass market paperback (640 pages with a 16 page black and white photo insert/$7.99).

The release of the blockbuster movie has renewed the nation's century-long fascination with the events surrounding the tragic maiden voyage of the Titanic. Primary source material for the movie included the Senate transcripts contained in The Titanic Disaster which reveal the truth behind the catastrophe and offer real insight into the real-life characters seen in the film. The transcripts detail the unheeded warnings about icebergs, the failure of half-empty lifeboats to return for other passengers, and other events contributing to the enormity of the disaster. We read the words of J. Bruce Ismay, president of the Titanic's parent company who had urged the ship's captain to risk increasing the ship's speed, confessing that he jumped into a lifeboat intended for women and children -- never looking back for a second at the doomed ship. Here, too, are the heartbreaking accounts of heroic deeds.

The Titanic Disaster reveals the content and conclusions of the Senate investigation hearings which themselves were a major event of the era. They began on April 19, 1912, just four days after the Titanic sank and the morning after the surviving passe

-- crystal smithwick (crystal@9v.com), January 30, 1998