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<![CDATA[Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/680923.Shadow_Divers_The_True_Adventure_of_Two_Americans_Who_Risked_Everything_to_Solve_One_of_the_Last_Mysteries_of_World_War_II
4.16102
Into Thin Air and Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm comes a true tale of riveting adventure in which two weekend scuba divers risk everything to solve a great historical mystery and make history themselves. For John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, deep wreck diving was more than a sport. Testing themselves against treacherous currents, braving depths that induced hallucinatory effects, navigating through wreckage as perilous as a minefield, they pushed themselves to their limits and beyond, brushing against death more than once in the rusting hulks of sunken ships. But in the fall of 1991, not even these courageous divers were prepared for what they found 230 feet below the surface, in the frigid Atlantic waters sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey: a World War II German U-boat, its ruined interior a macabre wasteland of twisted metal, tangled wires, and human bones all buried under decades of accumulated sediment. No identifying marks were visible on the submarine or the few artifacts brought to the surface. No historian, expert, or government had a clue as to which U-boat the men had found. In fact, the official records all agreed that there simply could not be a sunken U-boat and crew at that location. Over the next six years, an elite team of divers embarked on a quest to solve the mystery. Some of them would not live to see its end. Chatterton and Kohler, at first bitter rivals, would be drawn into a friendship that deepened to an almost mystical sense of brotherhood with each other and with the drowned U-boat sailors' former enemies of their country. As the mens' marriages frayed under the pressure of a shared obsession, their dives grew more daring, and each realized that he was hunting more than the identities of a lost U-boat and its nameless crew. Author Robert Kurson's account of this quest is at once thrilling and emotionally complex, and it is written with a vivid sense of what divers actually experience when they meet the dangers of the ocean's underworld. The story of Shadow Divers often seems too amazing to be true, but it all happened, two hundred thirty feet down, in the deep blue sea.]]>
62434.13256372300falseThu Feb 05 09:25:15 -0800 2009Thu Feb 05 09:25:15 -0800 2009
The "U-Who" and German soldiers' stories "have settled," Kurson writes, at the bottom of the sea, "where one uncovers the freeze-frames of final human experience." Critics compare Shadow Divers, a danger-filled adventure story that blends action, mystery, science, and military history, to Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air and Sebastian Unger's Perfect Storm. Like these true-adventure authors, Kurson, contributing editor to Esquire, definitely knows how to tell a story (some parts were previously covered in a PBS "Nova" segment). In vivid prose, he writes, "It is one thing to slither in near-total darkness through a shipwreck's twisted, broken mazes, each room a potential trap of swirling silt and collapsing structure. It is another to do so without knowing that someone did it before you and lived."Chatterton and Kohler both lived, though others died along the way. Kurson brings all the players back to life, recounting their perilous dives, jealousies, and life-threatening dangers with heart-stopping detail. The best parts recreate the lives of the German sailors aboard the "U-Who." Despite the book's riveting topic, a few critics complain that Chatterton and Kohler, whom Kurson made into business partners, hyped up their stories. But the most serious issue involves questions about the divers' ethics and motives, which Kurson doesn't address. These flaws, however, barely undermine a remarkable story about two men who risked their lives to uncover a lost piece of World War II history.