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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- ISBN13: 9780739320839
- Condition: New
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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 right tale of riveting adventure in which two weekend scuba divers risk everything to solve a fantastic past mystery–and make history themselves.
For John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, deep wreck diving was more than a sport. Hard 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 establish 230 feet not more than 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 inscription were visible on the submarine or the few artifacts brought to the surface. No historian, practiced, or government had a clue as to which U-boat the men had establish. 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 nearly mystical sense of brotherhood with each additional and with the drowned U-boat sailors–ex- 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.
Leader Robert Kurson’s account of this quest is at once thrilling and emotionally complex, and it is written with a plain sense of what divers really experience when they meet the dangers of the ocean’s underworld. The tale of Shadow Divers regularly seems too incredible to be right, but it all happened, two hundred thirty feet down, in the deep blue sea.
From the Hardcover edition.
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This is a very appealing book, portraying how super achievements above and beyond the call of duty are possible when the human spirit embraces right commitment to a cause.
John and Ritchie exemplify sacrificial and highly unusual devotion to a noble mission, and allow nothing to distract them from their goal.
The writer’s style is captivating, so that reading the book is like flowing with a stream rather than paddling against a current. It’s an simple read.
But, I cannot recommend this book to anyone because of the leader’s frequent inclusion of profanity and obscene language by persons who have never learned which end of their body is provided for defacation, so they use both ends. This potty-mouth language is really unnecessary and is like a decomposing, dead rat in an otherwise bowl of tasty stew.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
This book reads well but the tale isn’t really that compelling when one steps back and examines it. Just about everyone in the diving community knew about this sub, so this is not an “untold tale.” This is a classic example of the industry making “buzz” on one of the books it determines will break out. The unsuspecting public seems to be buying it hook line and sinker. There’s far more compelling tales out there from the real veterans who were there.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
(See synaptic mogul’s obvious rebuttal of my review. What a coincidence: I read Bill Zinsser, too–years ago. What an even greater coincidence that mogul happened to read Zinsser’s book just prior to reading Kurson’s. It puzzles me that a name could review Shadow Divers with the benefit of having just read On Writing Well–an brilliant book–and find no writing errors whatsoever.)
The many pleased reviews this book has received tells me that readers either can’t tell excellent writing from terrible writing, or they don’t care about the writing as long as the tale is appealing, or both. The writing is poor. Kurson doesn’t need an editor; he needs a high school English composition teacher. Take a look at some sentences from the first chapter of Shadow Divers. My comments are in parentheses.
“In a world where even the moon had been traveled, the floor of the Atlantic remained uncharted wilderness, its shipwrecks beacons for men compelled to look.” (You don’t travel the moon the way you might travel Portugal, or Madagascar. You travel TO the moon. Second, something submerged in a dark, inaccessable place has nothing in common with a beacon, i.e., a beacon of light. A beacon’s job is to compel men to look in its direction. If you compare something to a beacon it is redundant to point out that men are compelled to look at it.)
“Even if Nagle’s equipment and body could survive the deep Atlantic, he faced a smorgasbord of additional perils, each capable of killing him a’la carte.” (The metaphor is ridiculous and unworthy of a professional writer. A smorgasbord is a food buffet. Items on a buffet are there for the taking. One can pick and choose, or pass up the entire lot, lacking peril. These divers presumably faced a variety of threats to their safety over which, once they’d committed themselves to their dive, they had no choice. Here’s my re-write. “Even if Nagle’s equipment and body were up to the challenge of extant the deep Atlantic, he faced many perils.”)
“The sport’s cautionary tales, persons lifelines learned over beers with followers and by reading magazines and attending classes, were beaten into Nagle underwater at antihuman depths.” (Your buddy can tell you a tale, you can read a tale in a magazine, and you can hear a tale told during a class address. In this case, but, to say that a tale was “beaten into” you while you were underwater strains the meaning of the expression “to beat into.” I can reflect of better substitutes for “Lifelines” and “antihuman.” Kurson needs a thesaurus. Here’s my re-write. “Wreck-diving disaster tales shared over beers with followers, read in magazines and heard in diving classes were permanently on his mind, especially during these treacherous dives.”)
“They thought nothing of whipping out a sledgehammer and beating a window from the side of a ship, even as their heavy breath hastened nitrogen narcosis, the potentially deadly buildup of that otherwise compassionate gas in their brains.” (You might have terrible “breath,” but it’s your breathing that hastens nitrogen narcosis. You “whip out” a pen, but you “pull out,” “lift up,” or “swing,” a sledgehammer. “Deadly” and “potentially deadly” mean the same thing. It is unnecessary to mention “brain,” and if it were necessary, the way it is used here suggests that nitrogen can be establish only in the brain. Here’s my revision. “They thought nothing of using a sledgehammer to loosen a window from a ship, even as their heavy breathing hastened nitrogen narcosis, the deadly buildup in a diver’s bloodstream of that otherwise harmless gas.”)
“This time he saw the fisherman approaching, a tiny square of paper wrinkled in his hands.” (If the paper was wrinkled Nagle could not have known that it was square.)
The book is filled with silly, unnecessary descriptions. See page 58: “….but for years they lobbed accusations at eachother, verbal grenades filled with reputation-peircing shrapnel….” (My re-write. “….but they had been bickering for years….”
This tale deserved to be written by a better writer, yes, by a Sebastian Junger. Kurson’s inept writing, tin ear for descriptions and descriptions, and errors in logic divert a discriminating reader’s attention from this facinating tale.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Yes, “Shadow Divers” is a page-turner, as most additional reviewers have already noted. Any tale about courageous and honorable men (John Chatterton and Richie Kohler and their friends) dedicated to commemorating the lives of additional courageous and honorable men (the crew of the German sub U869) should be a page-turner. Moreover, leader Robert Kurson did his research,”Shadow Divers” is not a slapdash journalistic effort to turn a quick buck on a excellent tale. And while plenty of brilliant books offer first-hand glimpses into the upsetting — and fleeting — lives of the men in the German U-boat service, “Shadow Divers” exceptionally offers a fascinating look into the world of sport diving and the men who risk their lives to dive on wrecks. But ultimately, when I reached the end of this book I was glad to have finally gotten there, and I confess to skipping parts of the narrative along the way. Kurson writes in a “novelistic” style and while I judge the substance of the conversations he recreates here is faithful to what was really said, it should have been used more sparingly because relying so much on this contrivance to tell the tale drags after a while and gets in the way of what every reader wants to know: Who are the men in that sub down there? While Chatterton and Kohler place everything into solving the mystery of the U869, Kurson dwells far too long on each man’s past and I confess no interest at all in John Chatterton or Ritchie Kohler’s adolescent experiences or Chatterton’s Vietnam service. Note also that Kurson relies principally on the perspectives of Chatterton and Kohler to the exclusion of the views of their rivals which makes the suspicion the tale might lack a small balance. Finally, a quibble, I admit, there is a huge difference between sailors, marines, and soldiers and it bugs me when authors otherwise dedicated to their craft fail to know this.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
This a fascinating tale which is generally well-told, but the whole reading experience is marred by an excessive amount of profanity. Maybe some people talk like this, particularly in the diving profession, but the tale could have been told lacking subjecting the rest of us to it. Check out the DVD as a replacement for (“Hitler’s Lost Sub”); there you can delight in the tale lacking being covered in vile language.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5