Until Lord’s book, what most people had read about the Titanic came from the initial news stories, and then, as the years passed, from articles and interviews published on anniversaries of the sinking. Lord was the first writer to put it all together from a more distanced perspective. The unhurried detachment of his account nicely mirrors the odd calm that, according to so many survivors’ accounts, long prevailed aboard the stricken liner. “And so it went,” Lord wrote. “No bells or sirens, no general alarm.” His account has no bells or sirens, either; the catastrophe unfolds almost dreamily. There are the nonchalant reactions of passengers and crew, many of whom felt the sinking ship was a better bet than the tiny lifeboats. (“We are safer here than in that little boat,” J. J. Astor declared; he drowned.) There are the oddly revealing decisions: one socialite left his cabin, then went back and, ignoring the three hundred thousand dollars in stocks and bonds that he had stashed in a tin box, grabbed a good-luck charm and three oranges. There is the growing realization that there weren’t enough lifeboats; of those, many were lowered half full. There are the rockets fired off in distress, which one passenger recalled as paling against the dazzling starlight. And then the shattering end, marked by the din of the ship’s giant boilers, torn loose from their housings, hurtling downward toward the submerged bows.

There are iconic moments of panache and devotion, and of cowardice. Benjamin Guggenheim really did trade in his life jacket for white tie and tails. Mrs. Isidor Straus really did refuse to leave her husband, a co-owner of Macy’s: “Where you go, I go,” she was heard to say. Among the songs written after the sinking was one in Yiddish, celebrating the couple’s devotion. And—an anecdote that has been repeated in everything from a poison-pen letter sent soon after the sinking to an episode of Rod Serling’s “Night Gallery”—a woman in a lifeboat turned out not to be a woman at all. It was just a terrified Irish youth wrapped in a shawl.

Lord had access to many survivors, and the details that had lodged in their memories have the persuasive oddness of truth. One provides an unsettling soundtrack to the dreadful hour and a half between the sinking, at two-twenty in the morning, and the appearance of a rescue ship. Jack Thayer, a teen-age passenger from Philadelphia’s Main Line, who was one of only a handful of people picked out of the water by lifeboats, later recalled that the sound made by the many hundreds of people flailing in the twenty-eight-degree water, drowning or freezing to death, was like the noise of locusts buzzing in the Pennsylvania countryside on a summer night.

The closest that “A Night to Remember” comes to engineering drama is an account, shrewdly spliced into the larger narrative, of the doings of two ships that would become intimately associated with the disaster. One was the little Cunard liner Carpathia, eastbound that night en route from New York to the Mediterranean. Fifty-eight miles away from the Titanic when it picked up her first distress calls, it was the only ship to hasten to the big liner’s rescue, reversing its course and shutting off heat and hot water in an attempt to maximize fuel efficiency.

The other was the Californian, a small steamer that had stopped about ten miles from the Titanic—unlike the doomed ship, it had heeded the ice warnings—and sat there all through that terrible night, disregarding the Titanic’s frantic signalling, by wireless, Morse lamp, and, finally, rockets. Not all of this was as inexplicable as it seems: the Californian didn’t have a nighttime wireless operator. (All passenger ships were subsequently required by law to have round-the-clock wireless.) But no one has ever sufficiently explained why the Californian’s captain, officers, and crew failed to respond to what seemed like obvious signs of distress. The second officer merely thought it strange that a ship would be firing rockets at night. If Lord had been given to large interpretations, he might have seen in the one ship a symbol of the urgent force of human striving and, in the other, the immovable resistance of sheer stupidity.

About halfway through “A Night to Remember”—this is just after the ship has gone under, and an English socialite in a lifeboat turns to her secretary and sighs, “There is your beautiful nightdress gone”—Lord interrupts his narrative for a few pages of musings about what it all means. The themes he finds are characterized by an appealing combination of nostalgia and skepticism. One notion is that the sinking marked “the end of the old days” of nineteenth-century technological confidence, as well as of “noblesse oblige”; another is a sense that people behaved better back then, whether noblesse, steerage, or crew. When one officer was finally picked up from his lifeboat, he carefully stowed the sails and the mast before climbing aboard the rescue ship.

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But overshadowing everything is the problem of money and class. The Titanic’s story irresistibly reads as a parable about a gilded age in which death was anything but democratic, as was made clear by a notorious statistic: of the men in first class—who paid as much as four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars for a one-way fare at a time when the average annual household income in the U.S. was eight hundred dollars—the percentage of survivors was roughly the same as that of children in third class. For all his sentimentality about gentlemanly chivalry, Lord doesn’t shy away from what the sinking and its aftermath revealed about the era’s privileges and prejudices. “Even the passengers’ dogs were glamorous,” begins a tongue-in-cheek catalogue in “A Night to Remember” that includes a Pekingese called Sun Yatsen—part of the entourage of Henry Harper, of the publishing family, who, Lord laconically reports, had also picked up an Egyptian dragoman during his preëmbarkation travels, “as a sort of joke.” The book traces a damning arc from the special treatment enjoyed by the pets to the way in which third-class passengers were, at the end, “ignored, neglected, forgotten.”

Even so, Lord kept his sermonizing to a minimum. His book ends on a grace note: the seventeen-year-old Jack Thayer climbing into a bunk on the Carpathia, which saved seven hundred and six of the Titanic’s twenty-two hundred and twenty-three souls, and falling asleep after swallowing his first ever glass of brandy. “A Night to Remember” left the love stories, stolen diamonds, handcuffs, axes, and underwater lock-picking to others.

One sign of how efficiently Lord did his job is the air of embarrassment that hangs over the latest studies. John Maxtone-Graham, whose fond and thoroughgoing “The Only Way to Cross,” published in 1972, is considered a classic history of the ocean-liner era, interrupts his “Titanic Tragedy: A New Look at the Lost Liner” (Norton) halfway through in order to admit that he’d spent a long time trying to avoid the subject altogether. John Welshman’s “Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town” (Oxford) aims to “both build upon and challenge ‘A Night to Remember.’ ” His subtitle is a phrase borrowed from Lord’s book.

Yet, perhaps surprisingly, there seems to be no shortage of new angles. Because the allegedly unsinkable ship sank, its design and construction, as well as the number and disposition of the lifeboats, have often been the subject of debate. But Maxtone-Graham shifts the technological focus, by pointing up the crucial role of wireless communication. The Titanic was one of the first ships in history to issue an SOS. (“Send S.O.S.,” the twenty-two-year-old Harold Bride, the Titanic’s junior wireless operator, who survived, told the twenty-five-year-old Jack Phillips, the senior officer, who died. “It’s the new call, and it may be your last chance to send it.”) And the sinking was among the first global news stories to be reported, thanks to wireless radio, more or less simultaneously with the events. One of the early headlines, which appeared as the rescue ship carried survivors to New York—“WATCHERS ANGERED BY CARPATHIA’S SILENCE”—suggests how fast we became accustomed to an accelerating news cycle. The book winningly portrays the wireless boys of a hundred years ago as the computer geeks of their day, from their extreme youth to their strikingly familiar lingo. “WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH U?,” came one response to the Titanic’s distress call.