Titanic: THE DEATH AND LIFE OF A LEGEND by Michael Davie (Knopf: $19.95; 245 pp.)

Three-quarters of a century later, the sinking of the RMS Titanic in the icy North Atlantic remains one of the great dramas of all time.

British journalist Michael Davie may fall a bit short of his jacket billing as the first to tell the entire Titanic story from beginning to end. This book is not to the Titanic what “The Fatal Shore” is to the history of Australia. Still, Titanic is an absorbing, crisp chronicle of the Titanic, from its conception through the discovery and exploration of the wreckage on the sea floor by a U.S.-French expedition in 1985 and 1986.

Through able research, Davie further documents some of the facts known even to Titanic non-experts: The failure of Capt. E.J. Smith to respond to iceberg warnings, the deplorable lack of lifeboat capacity and the mysterious role of the ship Californian in neglecting to come to the rescue of the stricken liner.

Davie also demonstrates that the design and construction made the Titanic anything but unsinkable, his theory supported by the fact that the 1986 expedition found no 300-foot gash in the hull. Rather, the major damage from the iceberg seemed to be the separation of hull plates that had been riveted together.

There are fascinating eyewitness accounts from the official U.S. Senate and British inquiries.

One of the most intriguing is that of Mrs. J. Stuart White of New York who told the committee: “Nobody ever thought the ship was going down . . . . They speak of the bravery of the men. I do not think there was any particular bravery, because none of the men thought it was going down.”

She certainly was one of the more perceptive survivors, commenting just days after her rescue, “In my opinion the ship when it went down was broken in two. I think it very probably broke in two.” In fact, the 1985-86 expedition discovered the severed, wrecked stern of the ship some distance on the floor of the sea from the rest of the Titanic.

This volume’s non-sensational, frequently understated approach makes the facts of the Titanic disaster lively and fascinating. The reader may well thirst for more.