Raise the Titanic!

I chose this for the power of hook and title. This action & adventure novel with historical elements has the greatest title in the history of literature.

The purpose of a title is to sell the book, and no title ever succeeded so well. Raise the Titanic! was published a decade before the wreck of Titanic was discovered, so in the world’s imagination the ship was still largely intact. Cussler tapped into the intoxicating idea of the legendary ship’s resurrection and the completion of its maiden voyage.

I was so struck when I saw Raise the Titanic! in a bookstore,… show more.

Dirk Pitt’s career at the National Underwater Marine Agency—as well as the collection of classic cars and artifacts in his airplane hangar—chronicle daring adventures involving modern crises linked to lost pieces of history. In Raise the Titanic, tons of a rare ore smuggled out of Tsarist Siberia lies at the bottom of the Atlantic in the doomed Titanic’s hull. Decades after the sinking, the lost ore is now critical to an impenetrable American missile defense system. To succeed, Pit and his NUMA crew must evade Russian forces searching for the ore to thwart the American plans, locate the… show more.