Award-winning historian Frances Wilson delivers a gripping new account of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, looking at the collision and its aftermath through the prism of the demolished life and lost honor of the ship's owner, J. Bruce Ismay. In a unique work of history evocative of Joseph Conrad's classic novel Lord Jim, Wilson raises provocative moral questions about cowardice and heroism, memory and identity, survival and guilt--questions that revolve around Ismay's loss of honor and identity as his monolithic venture--a ship called "The Last Word in Luxury" and "The Unsinkable"--was swallowed by the sea and subsumed in infamy forever.