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Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster. By Steven Biel. (New York: Norton, 1996. x, 300 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-393-03965-X.)
Although the ship herself lies shrouded in darkness on the floor of the North Atlantic, the unsinkable Titanic still skims the waves of the popular imagination. Last summer, a luxury cruise promised well-heeled passengers the chance to watch a salvage crew raise a section of the liner with giant balloons (the project failed). A new Titanic movie, recounting the familiar tale of heroic gents in dinner jackets giving up their seats in the lifeboats to terrorstricken females and their children, is due out this summer. According to the press kits, the producers will emphasize special effects of an astonishing realism: it will feel just like being there in April 1915, when "the great ship went down" (as the old summer camp song says) off Newfoundland.
In Down with the Old Canoe, Steven...