»Lusitania

In search of a yarn about seagoing shenanigans, I picked up Diana Preston's Lusitania (with the coy sub-title "An Epic Tragedy").

The third sentence: "... they found that the flashes were not the desperate signals of a last, despairing survivor ... ."

And again, a few pages later: "The story of the Lusitania is, above all, about people -- whether British, German, or American, whether afloat on the liner, submerged in the submarine, or enmeshed in the various government machines ashore."

This sort of vocabuulary-deprived writing hurts my brain. I intensely dislike launching into a 500-page book when the author cannot write sentence tightly enough to avoid repeating root words. I'm not looking for synonyms, I just want expressive, clear history. Although the author has an extensive section of citations, the writing style seems more like Zagat's than like an academic work. Sentences are peppered with single-word quotations, or built from phrases enclosed in quotation marks.

The author capably relates the technical history involved in the sinking of the Lusitania, and the exciting naval developments leading to Germany's challenge for maritime supremacy. Sometimes she presumes historical knowledge I don't have, and this made the first few chapters rough going.