Breaking One of My Own Rules

As noted here, I have tried to follow my own rule about not reading "new" books about: The French Revolution, The Titanic, The British Royal Family. and so on. This rule is in place because time and again I have been sucked into thinking there is something new to be found out on the topic and I end up rereading things I already new and being annoyed for doing it, and because there are certain topics that I believe we know as much as we are ever going to know.
That, however, is the main seduction of history-- documents and information appears when you least expect it or is lost forever and no one knows differently. There is always the faint hope that really maybe there is something new out there.
Last week when I spied "Titanic's Last Secrets," by Brad Matsen (in conjunction with two men who have a series called Shadow Divers) I circled around it and was wary. I had heard something about it a few months ago because the big blurb about it was "It was worse than anyone imagined" which got my attention, because it really is hard to imagine that it could have been worse. Were there more people on board than originally guessed and therefore more deaths? Had the ship had a self destruct button which someone accidentally pressed? So I guess my curiosity was piqued by the question of how it could possibly have been worse than was thought.
The book starts out with a description on how the two Shadow Diver men got involved, how they end up on an expedition under possibly false pretenses but end up making a startling discovery. The tone is surprisingly casual. After the discovery, the reader has to go all the way to the 19th century to meet the main characters in the building of the ship. We learn such crucial detail as shipbuilders were allowed seven minutes per work day in order to use the bathroom, Lord Pirrie and his wife met as children, Bruce Ismay was mocked by his father for using a particular coat rack on his first day on the job. I actually got a little peeved with this this extensive side trip. When I say "and finally the ship sank" that is an indication of how peeved I was. The detail did not inform the discovery.
It is only at the last part that the significance of the discovery made way back in the beginning of the book is revealed. There have been many theories about why the ship sank-rivets, fires, conspiracies- but the book doesn't address them. Rather, it address why the ship sank...so fast.
The angle about the puzzlement about why the ship sank so quickly was intriguing. The sister ship, Olympic, had been rammed by another ship, leaving a huge hole in it, yet had been able to fully remove all of the passengers and been towed back to Belfast for repairs causing the launch of the Titanic to be delayed. So in a very indirect way, you could say that the Titanic sank because the USS Hawke hit the Olympic. If Titanic had launched on the original date, she might have missed the iceberg altogether). I guess they key is that the ship could hit something-- but it was the location of the hit that determined if it was a fatal blow- the difference perhaps between being shot in the foot or the head.
Long story short, the big revelation is that the ship did not go perpendicular to the sea, break apart at a 45 degree angle and fall to the ocean floor in two pieces as previously believed. It was actually...three pieces. The other revelation was that engineers at Harland & Wolfe kind of figured this out but kept quiet about it. It was pretty anti-climactic. Ultimately- the ship still sank. People died because the British Board of Trade did not require many lifeboats and because the California did not respond. I suppose the "it was worse than anyone thought" angle comes from the notion that the ship broke into more pieces than previously thought and that people in some of those pieces died faster than believed. I would think, if I were on the ship, that would have been a good thing.
If I had been in charge of the book, I would have made the tone less casual, cut out most of the background stuff that is common knowledge, and pitched it to National Geographic as an article.