Burgess provides insightful glimpses into the key players on this international stage: the brash and boastful Kaiser, whose jealousy of his uncle "Bertie" (later King Edward VII) made him dream of greater imperial glories; the eccentric plutocrat J. P. Morgan, who tried to buy the Atlantic and every ship on it; the brilliant inventor Charles Parsons, whose engines transformed ocean travel; the English shipping magnate J. Bruce Ismay, who watched from a lifeboat as his ship, the greatest ship of the age, sank amid icebergs; and the doomed German shipping magnate Albert Ballin, who brought the Kaiser's vision to life only to watch it disintegrate in the dread maelstrom of total war. The superliners of the Gilded Age so eclipsed their predecessors in size, splendor, and speed that they remain potent symbols of elegance, arrogance, and industrial might nearly a century after the last ones were built.They carried a flood of immigrants to America even as they reflected and magnified the frightening forces that were pushing Europe blindly into World War I. In a crowning irony, Germany's prize liners were used against her to carry American doughboys to the trenches of Europe.
Seize the Trident tells this epic tale for the first time in its entire sweep of triumph and folly, from its unassuming beginnings on a leisurely summer afternoon off England's shores to its ragged outcome in post-war Germany. Seize the Trident is a parable of imperial ambitions and ultimate tragedy set against the ostentatious backdrop of the Edwardian age, when dreams had no limits and the only standard of supremacy was excess.
Share This Book: