The Last Ships from Hamburg

"""As the marine historian Steven Ujifusa persuasively argues in his absorbing The Last Ships From Hamburg, [this] story is a David-and-Goliath tale of the industrial age."" -- The Wall Street Journal ""A captivating group portrait of three 'titans' of industry who facilitated the steamship routes by which around 2 million Jewish refugees, fleeing pogroms and discrimination, immigrated from Europe to America between 1890 and 1921 . . . . Ujifusa ties this intricate business history into a broader economic and diplomatic context and relates the experiences of regular people who made the crossings, including the families who perished aboard the Titanic. This innovative account provides a complex new perspective on the turn of the 20th century."" -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) ""A capable history that explains much about modern American demographics."" -- Kirkus Reviews ""Well-researched . . . . [A] meticulous investigation of turbulent days, as chronicled in The Last Ships from Hamburg, illuminates for the reader that once free of the fetters of European anti-Semitism, all things were possible."" -- The Times of Israel ""With impeccable research, masterful prose, and deep feeling, Steven Ujifusa tells the incredible story of one of the greatest human exoduses in history, of the 1.5 million Jews who escaped Czarist Russia, and the three people who helped make that possible. He gives readers a front-row seat along the way, to the boardrooms of German shipping companies, third-class hulls of ships crossing the Atlantic, to tenements on the Lower East Side. This is a page-turning history on a grand scale, with an intimate touch."" -- Steven Pressfield, bestselling author of Gates of Fire and The Lion's Gate ""Every once in a while a great story meets the writer who was meant to tell it, and readers can rejoice. The Last Ships from Hamburg tells an epic tale, and Steven Ujifusa brings a novelist's ear and a detective's eye for detail. It's a story of struggle, of survival, and of the resilience of the human spirit--the past brought to life with lessons for today."" -- Kermit Roosevelt III, author of The Nation that Never Was ""Steven Ujifusa's thoroughly researched and well-told story is a revelation. Intimate portraits of J.P. Morgan, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and several others who figured in the great transatlantic migration culminate in the startling story of its main character, Albert Ballin -- the little-known giant (though barely five feet tall) who was responsible for bringing more immigrants to the U.S. than any other person in the nation's history."" -- Daniel Okrent, author of The Guarded Gate and Last Call"