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62 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ OCTOBER 14, 2019
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of the books and subjects it covers. (Dec.)★ The Ship of Dreams:
The Sinking of the ‘Titanic’
and the End of the Edwardian Era
Gareth Russell. Atria, $30 (448p) ISBN 978-1-
5011-7672-2
Russell (Young and Damned and Fair)
recounts the story of the Titanic through
the experiences of six first-class passengers
and their families in this elegantly
written and impressively researched
account that takes a uniquely wide-
angled view of the disaster. Among those
profiled are British aristocrat Noëlle
Leslie, countess of Rothes; Thomas
Andrews, managing director of the
Belfast shipyard
where the
Titanic was
built; German-
American phi-
lanthropist Ida
Straus; John
Thayer, vice
president of the
Pennsylvania
Railroad, and
his son, Jack;
and Dorothy Gibson, “one of the
highest-paid actresses in the world.”
Russell adroitly sketches the back-
grounds of his main characters as he
tracks their movements during the
fateful trip, drawing from hundreds of
sources to describe the ship’s Turkish
baths, first-class dining saloon, six-
course meals, and boiler rooms. Along
the way, he offers crash courses in the
decline of the English aristocracy, the
Irish home rule movement, the rise of
American industrialists, and the fallout
from the 1881 assassination of czar
Alexander II, among other subjects, and
corrects the rumor that third-class passen-
gers were locked in their quarters on the
night the ship sank. The result is a scru-
pulous and entertaining portrait of “a
world that was by turns victim and
author of the tragedies that overtook it.”
Agent: Brettne Bloom, the Book Group.
(Dec.)Vineyards
Fred Lyon. Princeton Architectural Press, $40
(224p) ISBN 978-1-61689-848-9
“Nosiness and the innocence of youthcriminalized unsanctioned border cross-
ings, but “illegal entry” and “illegal
reentry” (after deportation) weren’t
widely prosecuted until President George
W. Bush launched the “war on terror,”
Hernández claims. Now they’re “the
crimes that federal prosecutors pursue
most often,” he writes, resulting in the
detention of “upward of half a million
people annually.” Hernández relates the
stories of imprisoned immigrants,
including a three-year-old boy who spent
650 days in an ICE facility, and acknowl-
edges that some border communities
depend on prisons for jobs and federal
funding. But he believes that detaining
migrants isn’t essential to enforcing the
law, arguing that undocumented immi-
grants should remain free as their cases
proceed through the courts. His
thoughtful mixture of reportage and legal
scholarship makes for an important entry
in the immigration debate. (Dec.)Reading Backwards
John Crowley. Subterranean, $40 (464p)
ISBN 978-1-59606-946-6
Crowley, best known for his fantasy
fiction (Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr),
shows his colors as an insightful critic in
this collection of 39 essays and book
reviews. Grouped into three loosely orga-
nized sections, the selections range over a
wide variety of themes and interests,
from a delightful introductory memoir
about Crowley’s youth as a passionate
Wagnerian, to considerations of the
eccentric art of Edward Gorey, the novels
of Ursula K. Le Guin and Richard
Hughes, the industrial design wizardry
of Norman Bel Geddes, Jack Womack’s
exhibition catalogue of UFO-logy, and
H.G. Wells’s reaction to Fritz Lang’s
futuristic film Metropolis. Crowley writes
with a light touch, but he’s adept at
bringing his subjects into sharp focus
with a well-phrased observation, as when,
in his essay “Unrealism,” he denotes the
attributes of classical romance incongru-
ously underpinning the film Taxi Driver
as an example of how artists “displace
romance material into their realistic
worlds without knowing that they do so.”
This book makes a fine companion
volume to Crowley’s previous essay collec-
tion, In Other Words (2007), and it will
likely send its readers to investigate morelogical data”; search for the lost crew of
the USS Jeannette; and reach “farthest
north,” the highest northern latitude
achieved by explorers. Greeley and his
men built Fort Conger on the northeast
coast of Ellesmere Island and survived
wolf attacks, temperatures approaching
–100 °F, and “months of total darkness.”
Relief ships,
hindered by bad
weather and ice
floes, failed to
reach the fort,
however, and in
August 1883
the group set
out on a 200-
mile journey
south from
Fort Conger to
Cape Sabine, where Greeley was under
orders to take his men if two consecutive
resupply efforts failed. But only a small
cache of emergency rations had been left
by the relief ships, and 18 members of
the 25-man crew died before rescuers
arrived in June 1884. Levy meticulously
documents the expedition’s scientific
achievements and praises Greeley’s lead-
ership skills. He also gives credit to
Greeley’s wife, Henrietta, for lobbying
President Chester A. Arthur and other
U.S. government officials to keep up
rescue efforts. The result is an intense
historical adventure with modern-day
relevance for the climate change debate.
Agent: Scott Waxman, Waxman Literary.
(Dec.)Migrating to Prisons:
America’s Obsession with
Locking Up Immigrants
César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández. New
Press, $24.99 (208p) ISBN 978-1-62097-420-9
University of Denver law professor
Hernández (Crimmigration Law) delivers
an accessible history and fierce critique of
the U.S. immigration system. For most of
American history, Hernández notes,
immigration law and criminal law were
separate, and “citizenship played no role
in whether people ended up behind bars.”
In the late 19th century, laws to limit
Chinese immigration led to the creation
of detention centers where officials distin-
guished between “desirable” and “unde-
sirable” migrants. In 1929, Congress