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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 ( Ballantine Books )
Release Date: 2005-05-31
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Product Description
In the tradition of Jon Krakauer’s 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 men’s 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.
From the Hardcover edition.
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 Shadow Divers
I totally enjoyed Shadow Divers. It kept your interest right up to the end. Would recommend this book for history lovers and divers. Full of suspense and mystery. Couldn't put the book down.
Kathy Kauranen
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 Shadow Divers
A very interesting book for those interested in Diving, Underwater Salvage and WWII history. Language can get a bit raw at times, but it is expected with this type of environment. In all, I really enjoyed reading it.
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Fascinating and well-written ( buskenseller )
The best work of non-fiction I've read in the past 5 years. Shadow Divers is compelling on so many levels--as a biography of men who risk their lives as wreck divers, as a look into the perils of deep wreck diving, and for the history of WWII and the German U-boat fleet. Kurson combines all of these elements to tell a gripping story/mystery that keeps you looking for answers until the end. An absolutely incredible story and masterfully told by Kurson. His journalistic instincts and writing style yield insight into the lives of the divers and why they do what they do. Highly reccomended.
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Underwater Journey ( spinaltap423 )
Intense drama from not only the diving but the relationships between the divers. It was a bold move to include quite a bit of personal information about John and Richie's family life in the book but I felt more compassionate about them and liked them more as people. The reader went on a journey along with the divers and I felt myself holding my breath often during many of the dive sequences. This book had enough diving for the divers and history for the historians but also the drama and real story telling that you expect from a novel.
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Amazing Book, Slow Start
Great book, well written with exception to the beginning. The first two chapters were excruciating. The rest of the book was a great and gripping story. A real page turner.
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