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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 |  | Author: Robert Kurson
Publisher: Random House
Category: eBooks
This item is no longer available
Rating:  323 reviews
Sales Rank: 7180
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Pages: 416
Number Of Items: 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5451
ASIN: B000FC1RSC
Publication Date: June 29, 2004
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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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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 323
 A Great Read on Multiple Levels July 21, 2010
Henry R OConnor (Washington, DC, US)
A truly inspiring read about two fairly regular guys who accomplished a fairly incredible task through hard work, perseverence and common sense ingenuity, proving about a dozen "experts" wrong in the process.
Kurson does an excellent job of taking the reader into a number of different worlds- the technical world of deepwater scuba diving, the "weekend warrior" world of the deepwater wreck divers who hold regular jobs during the week and pursue this dangerous and fascinating hobby on the weekends, and the world of the German u-boats operating off the American east coast during WWII and the Americans trying to combat them. What makes the book exceptional is that, if the author's foreward is to be believed, his descriptions of all of these "worlds" are true-to-fact and meticulously researched, yet the writing and narrative clip along more like an adventure novel than a textbook.
I suspect that folks with an interest in scuba diving, shipwrecks or WWII will cotton to this book more quickly than others, but I'd recommend the book to anyone. Even if you don't have an interest in those subjects when you pick up the book, you might develop one quickly. And in a broader sense, it's a great story of mankind's innate thirst for discovery and "pioneer spirit" manifested in two ordinary guys, and a great example of how far perseverence combined with common sense ingenuity can take you.
Shadow Divers - A good read July 20, 2010
T. Sullivan (CA)
Diver or not this is a well written book. I must read for those interested in real life adventures.
FANTASTIC BOOK!! July 11, 2010
KIRKJ
WHAT AN AMAZING BOOK! THIS IS ONE YOU'LL WANT TO SHARE WITH EVERYONE. I HAVE GIVEN IT AS A GIFT TO SEVERAL PEOPLE. YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO PUT IT DOWN. WHAT A STORY!
Excellent! June 4, 2010
JC (USA)
This book will keep you on tenderhooks from beginning to end. It's excellent, well-written, and true.
 Like sitting in a marina bar while diver's tell stories........... May 24, 2010
Nascar Runner (MO United States)
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It combines real-life thrill seekers and WWII history. My husband felt there were a few inaccuracies in the scuba diving portion, but I still think it's amazing, after all these years, that we are still rewriting history.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 323
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