"Sinkable" by Daniel Stone

Another book on the Titanic? Daniel Stone, the author of "Sinkable," admits there's a fixation with that ship that collided with an iceberg in 1912 and, regrettably, sank. But that's the focus of the book: it's about shipwrecks and the most famous of them all remains the Titanic.Stone, a former staff writer for the National Geographic, wonders aloud what is it about the Titanic that makes it the poster child for disasters at sea.He tells Steve Tarter that he's finally come up with the reason the Titanic has been enshrined in history. "There were 1,500 people who died on board but there were 712 survivors--many of them children who would go on to tell their story for decades," said Stone.Stone's book details other major shipwrecks, accidents that haven't caught the public's eye like the Titanic. There's the  Waratah, for example, sometimes referred to as "Australia's Titanic", a 500-foot steamer with 211 passengers on board that was on its way to Africa before disappearing without a trace in 1909. Stone also relays the story of the USS Maine, the ship sent to Havana Harbor that exploded and sank in 1898, setting off the Spanish-American War. The Maine was later patched up, raised and sunk in deeper waters in 1911, he said.The sea can be a dangerous place. More people have died on boats and ships than ever will be killed in automobile accidents, related Stone, pointing out that passage by sea, once the most common way to travel long distances, was often steeped in peril.There's still danger today, he noted. The giant container ships that ply the oceans bringing goods to anxious consumers will occasionally disappear but we don't hear about it, said Stone. More often, individual containers, often stacked high on these ships, are lost at sea, he said.Shipwrecks stay in the news. Earlier this year Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance, a long-lost treasure, was found near the South Pole, said Stone.