Titanic

LIFE's offering for the centenary of the wreck of Titanic is a slender coffee-table book with many photographic reproductions and relatively little text, which is expanded in font size to take up more space. The book doesn't break much new ground, hitting the usual highlights of the story, but with some instances of inappropriately breathless prose (e.g., "Okay, statistics fans, here we go!"), riddled with tiresome asides and cringeworthy pop culture references (e.g., "For four days, then, all was extravagant oceangoing bliss...and Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet canoodled in a corner"). A chapter featuring stories of selected survivors includes some photographs not usually seen. There is also a chapter on the discovery of the wreck and the salvage activities. Some of the photographic enlargements are not sharply reproduced. There is no index and no bibliography.