Titanic: Voices from the Disaster by Deborah Hopkinson

What strikes me about Titanic: Voices from the Disaster by Deborah Hopkinson is that it presented so much information that I had not read elsewhere. There were many pictures shared that I had not seen and facts that were intriguing (e.g. - the information about the radio operators). The story of the voyage was told from several different perspectives: objective narrator and the point-of-view of survivors from each travel class. The first person accounts were fascinating and even though I was aware these were survivors, their stories were riveting and the manner in which they were woven together made me feel as though I was there watching the voyage unfold.

This book is set up in a way that makes it incredibly accessible to middle school students. The pages of text are written in a clean, crisp font and are interspersed with large pictures with easy-to-read captions; instead of sidebars there are shaded pages that describe incidental information that helps the reader in understanding the main text; follow-up information on prominent passengers and the survivors quoted in the book, charts on the lifeboats, glossary and quotes from the final investigative report are included as part of the main text, but in a way that makes the them easy to locate.

I can't wait to share Titanic with my students. Some of my 8th graders do research on disasters and our 7th grade just took a field trip to see the Titanic exhibit at the Franklin Institute as part of a cross-disciplinary unit - I'm sure this book will be in high demand.

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