From the national bestselling author of The Food Explorer a fascinating and rollicking plunge
into the story of the world s most famous shipwreck the RMS Titanic On a frigid April night in
1912 the world s largest and soon most famous ocean liner struck an iceberg and slipped
beneath the waves. She had scarcely disappeared before her new journey began a seemingly
limitless odyssey through the world s fixation with her every tragic detail. Plans to find and
raise the Titanic began almost immediately. Yet seven decades passed before it was found. Why?
And of some three million shipwrecks that litter the ocean floor why is the world still so
fascinated with this one? In Sinkable Daniel Stone spins a fascinating tale of history
science and obsession uncovering the untold story of the Titanic not as a ship but as a
shipwreck. He explores generations of eccentrics like American Charles Smith whose 1914
recovery plan using a synchronized armada of ships bearing electromagnets was complex
convincing and utterly impossible Jack Grimm a Texas oil magnate who fruitlessly dropped a
fortune to find the wreck after failing to find Noah s Ark and the British Doug Woolley a
former pantyhose factory worker who has claimed since the 1960s to be the true owner of the
Titanic wreckage. Along the way Sinkable takes readers through the two miles of ocean water in
which the Titanic sank showing how the ship broke apart and why and delves into the odd
history of our understanding of such depths. Author Daniel Stone studies the landscape of the
seabed which in the Titanic s day was thought to be as smooth and featureless as a bathtub. He
interviews scientists to understand the decades of rust and decomposition that are slowly but
surely consuming the ship. (She s expected to disappear entirely within a few decades!) He even
journeys over the Atlantic during a global pandemic to track down the elusive Doug Woolley.
And Stone turns inward looking at his own dark obsession with both the Titanic and shipwrecks
in general and why he spends hours watching ships sink on YouTube. Brimming with humor
curiosity and wit Sinkable follows in the tradition of Susan Orlean and Bill Bryson offering
up a page-turning work of personal journalism and an immensely entertaining romp through the
deep sea and the nature of obsession.
