Richard Goldstein: Desperate Hours: The Epic rescue of the Andrea Doria

By JOHN McCRYSTAL

On July 25, 1956, two ships which should have passed in the night south of the North American port of Nantucket collided. They were the Andrea Doria, the pride of the Italian liner fleet, with 1134 passengers and 572 crew aboard, and the Swedish liner Stockholm, also with a full complement.

The prang left the Stockholm's sharply raked bow in ruins and the Andrea Doria with a huge hole in her starboard side, taking water at such a rate and in such a way that it was clear she would soon sink. Five of the Stockholm's crew, asleep in the forward accommodation area, and several of the Andrea Doria's passengers were killed on impact. With the Italian ship doomed and half of her lifeboats out of action due to her ever-increasing list, everyone else aboard was in dire danger.

Over the next few hours, a number of US Coast Guard and civilian vessels raced to accomplish what became the (then) greatest ever peace-time rescue at sea. As news began to filter back to the mainland, the US and world media were riveted. Even as far away as New Zealand, the dramatic rescue of 1660 survivors kept people glued to radios.

As with every large-scale tragedy, there were many acts of selflessness and heroism, and of cowardliness. Goldstein, an old newspaperman who has worked for the New York Times for the past 20 years, does a good job of telling the confused story of the collision and rescue. His style is creaky in patches, but he resists the all-too common temptation to embellish or overwrite an already dramatic story. It is meticulously researched: there are more than 60 interviews along with the long list of books, articles, videos and official documents in the bibliography.

There's a disaster-movie feel to the narrative, which tells the stories of several of the passengers and crew before and after the collision.

But like most disaster movies, it is a little hard to engage with Desperate Hours, perhaps because we are surrounded by and inured to catastrophe in the early-21st century. The sinking had a far greater impact in the 1950s, when even though the golden era of ocean liners had passed, the majority of people still travelled internationally by sea.

* John Wiley & Sons $57.95

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.