...The Canadian Hugh Brewster joined the committed ranks of Titanic-philes in the mid-1980s, when he spent a year creating a book from images and data of Robert Ballard’s discovery of the wreck. In Brewster’s new book, “Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage,” he revisits the ill-fated trans-­Atlantic crossing as experienced by the “rare gathering” of famous and affluent among the approximately 1,500 who died and the 705 who survived.

Brewster’s nuanced account introduces us to a plutocracy frolicking in the sunset of England’s Edwardian era and Ameri­ca’s Gilded Age. He pushes past stereotypes to vividly describe the elite realm on deck, a place where the American politico Archie Butt, a right-hand man to Presidents Roosevelt and Taft, might have shared pleasantries with Capt. Edward J. Smith or chatted with John Jacob Astor IV as he exercised his Airedale, Kitty. A bugler’s call signaled passengers to rise from their gilt-edged loungers in the Turkish bath, or to put down their stogies in the opulent public room designed to emulate Versailles, and descend the grand staircase in white tie and splendid gowns for a lusty meal including “Oysters à la Russe,” “Chocolate Painted Éclairs” and, of course, Champagne (more than 22,000 bottles of wine, beer and spirits were onboard). The women would have had to go light on the 11-course meal, as most were still squeezed into corsets. The inconceivable distance between this twinkling reality and death in the dark, icy waters was but a few hours.

The haunting moans and pleas of those pitched into the sea — and even worse, the silence that followed — are what plague the subjects in “Shadow of the Titanic,” by the British journalist and biographer Andrew Wilson. Many survivors suppressed memories of the event, but nearly all reported that the “awful, nightmarish cries” of those dying in the water were never forgotten....