Ada residents won't take a ride on the Titanic, but they will meet in June a discuss the maiden voyage of the ship.

The meeting is the next Ada Public Library book discussion. The discussion is at 7 p.m., Tuesday, June 5, at the library. The book being discussed is Walter Lord's "A Night to Remember.

On April 15, 1912, the Titanic was on her maiden voyage from England to New York when it struck an iceberg, leading to a loss of 1,514 lives. Lord’s painstaking research, interviews with survivors, and deft writing combine to make this work unsurpassed in looking at the tragedy. Lord takes us beyond the movie myths and legends, and provides with riveting history.

The book received widespread praise from contemporary critics. The New York Times called it "stunning ... one of the most exciting books of this or any other year". The Atlantic Monthly praised the book for doing "a magnificent job of re-creative chronicling, enthralling from the first word to the last." Entertainment Weekly said that it was "seamless and skillful... it's clear why this is many a researcher's Titanic bible", while USA Today described it as "the most riveting narrative of the disaster."[6]

The secret to Lord's success, according to the New York Herald Tribune's critic Stanley Walker, was that he used "a kind of literary pointillism, the arrangement of contrasting bits of fact and emotion in such a fashion that a vividly real impression of an event is conveyed to the reader." Walker highlighted the way that Lord had avoided telling the story through the prism of social class, which had been the usual style of previous narratives, and instead successfully depicted the human element of the story by showing how those aboard reacted to the disaster whatever their class.[6]