Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

by Robert Kurson

— If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it. — If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving. — Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average. — Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives with these decisions forever. — Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you. — It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong. — The guy who gets killed is often the guy who got nervous. The guy who doesn’t care anymore, who has said, “I’m already dead—the fact that I live or die is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the accounting I give of myself,” is the most formidable force in the world. — The worst possible decision is to give up.

That last one sticks out as a sore thumb in this book. There are clearly a few people who should have given up.