Thanks to Gordon Lightfoot’s hit, the Edmund Fitzgerald is the Great Lakes shipwreck of which most of us have heard. Kenosha author Michael Schumacher returns to the subject with The Trial of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Schumacher has written biographies of Eric Clapton and Francis Ford Coppola, as well as a perceptive history of the 1968 election, but he has also made himself into a leading maritime historian of the Great Lakes. With The Trial, Schumacher examines the documents left by the official inquiries into the sinking. Not unlike a Supreme Court ruling, the National Transportation Safety Board’s report included dissenting opinions. In Schumacher’s view, the wreck of the famous laker, which sank rapidly during a November 1975 storm and took all hands to the bottom of Lake Superior, remains a mystery.
