A key to Lord's method is his technique of adopting an unconventional approach to the chronology of the event, "[taking] an imaginative approach to time and space in which hours and minutes prove extremely malleable, the ship itself seems almost infinitely complex, and the disaster assumes order and unity from far away."[8] In short it is "a modernist narrative [constructed] around a modernist event."[8] Reviewers highlighted the way in which Lord depicted the human side of the Titanic story, which The New York Times called "the core of Mr. Lord's account, and explains its fascination, a pull as powerful in its way as the last downward plunge of the ship itself."[9] While the "legendary acts of gallantry" stood out, the book invites readers to put themselves in the place of those aboard and implicitly asks how they would react in the same situation.[10] As Newsweek put it, "What would it be like to be aboard a sinking ocean liner?"[10]