Lost to Time

Starred review from August 1, 2010
Such a splendid book, full of fascinating, well-told tales. Heres the Sultana, a 260-foot steamboat that sank in 1865 with a death toll higher than that of the Titanic. Heres Americas first subway, constructed in New York under utmost security in 1870, more than 30 years before the current subway system opened. Heres Exercise Tiger, a rehearsal for the 1944 D-Day invasion of Normandy that, believe it or not, led to more deaths than the actual Utah Beach attack. Heres Gustave Whitehead (born Gustav Weisskopf), a German immigrant who piloted a powered aircraft a full two years before the Wright brothers. And thats just a taste of this eye-opening book. Historian Sandler has assembled a diverse and bafflingly overlooked collection of historical curiosities, forcing us to wonder how its possible that we never learned this stuff in school? In some cases, there are explanations: the Sultana sinking, for example, was overshadowed in the press by the aftermath of Lincolns assassination 13 days earlier, and the Exercise Tiger debacle was covered up for decades. But in other cases were just left scratching our heads, wondering how these remarkable moments in history were allowed to slip through the cracks of time.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)