While many books have been written about this disaster over the years, there's nothing like a first hand account to give you the feeling of immediacy. Laurence Beesley was on the Titanic for her first and final voyage (and this was published two months later), and he describes the entire trip, from original pleasantries to his fortuitous rescue by the Carpathia. It's amazing to read how calm everyone was boarding the lifeboats, and it makes a modern reader wonder if they were as completely clueless as he states, or if it was just the prevailing sentiment of the time (stiff upper lip, don't let them see you sweat, that sort of thing). At the end of the book, he takes some time to delve I what might have saved more people, which gives insight into what resources were available at that time; whether or not ships were taking advantage of them was a whole other thing. Finally, he laments fake news, as some papers published gory stories about the final hours and minutes of the Titanic's passengers before the Carpathia got to New York, and therefore, no one yet had any idea of what had happened in great detail.

This book was written by one of the survivors of the Titanic. It paints a very different picture than the newspapers of the time.