Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II
    Unavailable
    Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II
    Unavailable
    Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II
    Audiobook (abridged)6 hours

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

    Written by Robert Kurson

    Narrated by Scott Campbell

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJun 29, 2004
    ISBN9780739312001
    Unavailable
    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

    Robert Kurson is the author of the runaway bestseller Shadow Divers as well as Crashing Through. After a law degree from Harvard Law School, he began his writing career at the Chicago Sun-Times as a data entry clerk, a position which led to a full-time features writing job. In 2000, Esquire published 'My Favorite Teacher', his first magazine story, which became a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Based in Chicago, he is currently a contributing editor to Esquire.

    Related to Shadow Divers

    Related audiobooks

    Wars & Military For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      War Of The Wager

      Jul 2, 2023

      War Of The Wager
      3 min read

    • Article

      WRECK Ommendations

      Feb 22, 2016

      Written by Richie Kohler with Charlie Hudson I am fortunate to be able to review many books about truly historical shipwrecks. Some are more exceptional than others. When our dear friend, Richie Kohler, presented his new book, Mystery of the Last Oly

      7 min read

    • Article

      Depths of understanding

      Jan 20, 2023

      Depths of understanding
      6 min read

    • Article

      WRECK Ommendations

      Aug 30, 2018

      Florida’s Lost Galleon: The Emanuel Point Shipwreck Edited by Rodger Smith Florida waters have long been considered a treasure hunters’ paradise as there are many Spanish Galleons and other historical vessels that have met their fate and wrecked ther

      6 min read

    • Article

      Revisiting The Mysterious World Of Arthur C Clarke

      Sep 9, 2021

      Over the course of 13 short episodes first broadcast in 1980, The Mysterious World of Arthur C Clarke took teatime viewers of ITV through the case files of the celebrated science fiction writer – also solemnly identified as the “inventor of the commu

      13 min read

    • Article

      Spirit of Shackleton

      Dec 11, 2022

      Spirit of Shackleton
      2 min read

    • Article

      Book Of The Month

      Feb 23, 2024

      RMS Queen Mary The World’s Favourite Liner David Ellery Published by Pen & Sword Books Ltd, 47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorks S70 2AS 240 pages, hardbackediting@pen-and-sword.co.uk Price £40 Probably the most famous and certainly one of the bes

      3 min read

    • Article

      Urban Diversion

      Dec 3, 2019

      Erik Weihenmayer is no stranger to adversity. As the first and only blind person to summit Mount Everest, he continues to pursue seemingly impossible goals. While the title claims “No Barriers,” what it means for the rest of us is “No Excuses.” Erik’

      1 min read

    • Article

      The great White South

      May 19, 2023

      The great White South
      11 min read

    • Article

      WRECKommendations

      Jun 30, 2017

      Written and Illustrated by Tom Hemphill and Floyd Holcom Arcadia Publishing is the largest publisher of local history books and regional content guides in America and is located in my hometown, Mount Pleasant, SC. Over the years, they have brought a

      8 min read

    • Article

      Forever Salvaged

      Feb 13, 2024

      Forever Salvaged
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Monarch Of All I Survey

      Nov 22, 2019

      The Monarch Of All I Survey
      6 min read

    • Article

      Time and Tide

      Feb 16, 2022

      Time and Tide
      8 min read

    • Article

      Hurrah For The Wavy Navy

      Mar 9, 2022

      Hurrah For The Wavy Navy
      5 min read

    • Article

      From the Debris Field...

      Jun 30, 2017

      Wreck divers from everywhere on the planet are invited to submit newsy tidbits of timely information (also called “short, sharp, shipwreck shout-outs”) about a wreck in their area. Perhaps there is not enough information, or enough archival and/or un

      4 min read

    • Article

      Of Land And Sea

      Jan 26, 2020

      Of Land And Sea
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Killing Of A God

      Jan 28, 2022

      The Killing Of A God
      12 min read

    • Article

      WRECKommendations

      Jan 19, 2017

      Fatal Crossing: The Mysterious Disappearance of NWA Flight 2501 and the Quest for Answers Written by V.O. van Heest On the night of June 23, 1950, Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 2501, operating its daily transcontinental service between New York Ci

      7 min read

    • Article

      WRECKommendations

      Aug 31, 2015

      Written by Stephen B. Daniel There is a reason that every issue of Wreck Diving Magazine has at least one article on Great Lakes wreck diving - because the Great Lakes are a wreck diver’s paradise! Lake Superior, largest of the Great Lakes and the la

      4 min read

    • Article

      Woke The Plank! Were Pirate Ships Actually Beacons Of Diversity And Democracy?

      Apr 4, 2023

      In September 1695, the Plymouth-born “king of pirates”, Henry Avery, seized treasure worth £600,000 (in today’s terms, nearly £100m) from the Grand Mughal fleet in the Red Sea. What happened next is uncertain. The most boring legend has Avery – AKA H

      6 min read

    Reviews for Shadow Divers

    4.5/5

    611 ratings42 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      very well researched. hard to believe the author was not there for any of the events
    • 4/5
      Learned a lot about U-Boats in World War 2. This is the story of a group of divers who discovered a shipwrecked German submarine (U-boat), off the shore of New Jersey! Beginning in 1991, it took them 7 years to identify the boat.
    • 5/5
      Enjoyed this immensely. Wrapped U-boat history and the perils of deep water diving into a suspenseful book that reads like a novel. Kurson's writings lend themselves well to the audiobook format.
    • 5/5
      This was a "can't put downer." Really like the way Kurson wove the story of the sub with the biographies of the people involved. He really kept the suspense going throughout. I had to keep reading to find out what was going to happen next.
    • 5/5
      THIS IS A REVIEW OF THE RANDOM HOUSE AUDIO EDITION, NARRATED BY CAMPBELL SCOTT.A German U-boat was sunken off the coast of New Jersey during World War II. Almost fifty years later, a man named Nagel and his group of elite divers discovered the wreck, 230 feet below the sea, mangled and corroded. There was one problem. It was thought impossible that a U-boat could be there. Thence they chanced upon one of the most baffling mysteries of World War II; a mystery that two divers, Chatterton and Kohler, were determined to solve at any cost. This is their story. The narration was excellent. The voice of Campbell Scott was not monotonous in the least, nor did he do a bad job at the many accents of the characters. The story was enthralling, and kept you hooked from beginning to end. The intense research of the author was beyond belief. I usually do not like books with as much foul language as this audiobook had, but since that was the way these gritty seafaring people truly talked, I can excuse it in this instance. The interviews with the author and the two actual divers this book is about was extra amazing. I loved this audiobook, and would highly recommend it! Five stars.
    • 4/5
      In 1991, a small group of recreational wreck divers found an unknown German U-Boat off the coast of New Jersey. It had never been found, never been explored, and the quest of its discoverers quickly changed from recreation to investigation, and a quickly developing sense of fellowship with the crew, whose bones lay scattered thickly in piles of silt. How the divers grew from thrill-seekers to heroes is the central theme of this book, disguised in a story of diving at extreme depths amidst near-zero visibility and the ever-present possibility of vivid and terrifying death.Although superficially a simple adventure tale of man against nature, the ethical and moral issues of treasure-hunting wreck sites are not skirted, and the character studies are compelling. One man drinks himself to death. Three die exploring the wreck. The two who become the central figures in the story change in surprising ways, and when the boat is identified and the identities of the German crew are uncovered, their stories are revealed with great poignancy and a satisfying resolution.
    • 4/5
      Excellent audio book. Hard to believe it's true!
    • 4/5
      An interesting account of the discovery of a German submarine off the coast of New Jersey and the heroic efforts of the divers. It seemed a bit sensationalized (similar to Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer).
    • 4/5
      This book sparked my interest in learning more about WWII. It captured my attention with its rich history of German U-boats and why, for a few years, they were the most feared weapon of the sea. The obstacles divers, John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, faced in diving the wreck kept me on the edge of my seat. Their research was fastidious and relentless. Their passion was even greater. They would eventually identify this submarine they had found at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and in the process rewrite history.
    • 4/5
      I do not normally enjoy books in this genre, but I was captured by the single-mindedness and toughness of the key divers in the book. When I read books like Touching the Void and this one, I realize I'm not all that tough. THESE GUYS are tough and more than a little crazy. I'm thankful that humans are wired to live vicariously through others.

      The book centers on the unique culture of treasure seeking divers. They raise capital each year and spend as much time as they are able to searching the sea for lost boats. I enjoyed reading about the development of underwater diving and how changes in mixtures of chemicals allowed divers to go deeper for longer periods of time. Kurson did a solid job of explaining the perils deep divers face and how the simplest mistakes most often turn deadly. Space is unforgiving and the deep seas is no slouch in this regard either.

      The main divers in the book discover what they believe is a German sub off of the US east coast. Their pursuit of what's on board it, the secrecy under which they work, and their ultimate results as years of diving and researching, is interesting. I did find the end to drag along, but that doesn't take away from the entire experience of the book. Worth reading if you enjoy these types of books.
    • 5/5
      When I was around ten years old my dad handed me this book. Looking back on it, I'm not too sure why he did so.

      This is what I remember: I heard the word "motherfucker" for the first time, and reflected that it's one hell of a curse word. I became engrossed in the truth and real journalism in this novel--it made me realize the mysteries of the world and the great depths of the sea. Mostly, though, I remember loving the men and their devotion to this wreck. I remember them perservering through it all to try to uncover the truth about something they had fallen in love with, in a way.

      I guess he had wanted to entertain me while I was stuck with him at his office the whole day. Maybe he wanted to teach me a lesson about dedication and freindship. Maybe he wanted to teach me about my Jewish heritage and submarines and warfare and such, somehow.

      I remember loving this book and not putting it down until I was finished. Mostly, though, I just remember asking my dad what a motherfucker was, hah!
    • 5/5
      A great book for divers as well as those who prefer to stay above the surface of the sea.
    • 5/5
      An extremely well written and unbelievably true adventure concerning the events and lives of a small group of deep shipwreck divers who discover a totally unknown sunken U-boat 60 miles off the New Jersey coast in late 1991. Located 230 ft below the ocean surface, it is at a depth that only a few of the top divers in the world can approach; an environment where the slightest mistakes can cost your life. Add the cramped, torn, twisted, and destructed nature of the sub’s interior and the risks increase even further.

      Robert Kurson does a great job of writing, not only the story line, but at a level that allows individuals like me (who have never been exposed to diving) to understand and be transposed into this unique world and feel as though an active participant.

      The timeframe transcends 6 years; from the circumstances leading up to the sub’s discovery, through a whole series of multilayered paths that cumulate with the eventual determination of it’s identity and that of the crew that perished with it. During this period, Kurson not only details the incredible diving and investigative experiences, but he also develops the personal side of the main “characters” involved. From strengths, growth, evolving friendships; to weaknesses, broken relationships, even tragedy and death. You get to “know” these men, feel their drive, determination, and obsession. You develop an understanding of their willingness to risk so much. And you celebrate in their achievements.

      I totally enjoyed Shadow Divers. My next stop is to check out a PBS Web site for Hitler’s Lost Sub, a Nova documentary on this “mystery” sub (pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostsub).
    • 5/5
      Only the necessity of sleep kept me from reading this book in one sitting. The author’s revealing characterizations and informative style made the dedicated divers and long-dead U-Boat sailors come to life. I found myself rooting for Chatterton and Kohler, and despairing along with them as clue after clue didn’t reveal the submarine’s identity for six long years. I was so thrilled when all their gambles with their lives (literally) finally paid off and they solved the mystery, but also sad because I knew it would mean the end of the book. The PBS television show NOVA – Hitler’s Lost Sub is a great accompaniment to the book.
    • 4/5
      From the author: "While researching the dangers of deep-shipwreck diving, I was struck by a remark that the divers make about depth. The mystery . . . lay in such deep, dark waters that occasionally they could do little more than dive at shadows. It occurred to me then that there were shadows cast throughout the story - by the fallen crewmen, by World War II, by the seeming infallibility of written history, by questions the divers came to ask about themselves as men. For six years, Chatterton and Kohler were shadow divers. For six years, they went on a remarkable journey. I wrote this book to take you there with them."In Shadow Divers, Robert Kurson does a masterful job of taking us there with them. And what a story it is. A late night meeting in a bar leads to the sharing of coordinates for a mysterious ocean location off the New Jersey shore where fish and other sea life congregate - often the sign of a wreck. But whatever it is, it's very deep, maybe too deep, in the water.Wreck diving is a dangerous sport - people die attempting it. There are only a few hundred divers in the U.S. who try it, and only a few, the top elite, can handle deep dives beyond 200 feet. One big reason why is narcosis. Divers breathe a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen (and, in more recent times, helium), and the nitrogen building up in the blood under increasing pressure from the dive's depth diminishes the senses, narrowing vision, impairing reasoning, and sometimes creating hallucinations. It is necessary to stay calm, even while impaired like this, and not run through your oxygen with anxious breathing , and to make good, life-saving decisions, sometimes in a wreck full of potential traps, and always in a huge ocean that will be your death if you lose your way back to your boat. Only a few can begin to do what is necessary, and even some of those fail in the end.At one point, one of the wreck divers sees crabs emerging from the ocean floor and talking to him, urging him to follow them away from the wreck and away from the life-saving line back up to the boat. "He started talking to himself. 'I gotta get out of here', he said. 'Crabs are talking to me. When a crab talks it's time to go home.'"The two central characters in this story, Chatterton and Kohler, are fascinating. Both were bright men who were fish out of water (!) in school, searching for something to give their life meaning. Chatterton became a heroic medic in Viet Nam. Kohler kicked around, but later found his keen interest and self-taught education in his German ancestry and World War II to be an essential component of solving the book's mystery. Chatterton is a deep and methodical thinker, even developing a carefully rendered set of beliefs in Viet Nam. That list of beliefs begins - "If an undertaking was easy, someone else would already 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." You can see the type of person we're talking about. He maximizes success and minimizes danger by studying wrecks first, including videotaping them at the outset to help planning, and yet in Viet Nam and in wreck diving, he takes chances that others would cower at.At first he is skeptical about Kohler, who initially had allied himself with a motorcycle gang-type group of divers. But Kohler's excellence in diving and passion for solving the wreck's mysteries deepens their relationship over time. They go to great lengths, not only in dangerous, tension-filled diving that has the reader on pins and needles, but in researching around the world what exactly happened to cause what they found. There is an emotional connection with the victims, and they learn that written history is sometimes very wrong. As a result, while remaining "a voracious reader of history", Kohler says, "In the back of my mind I {now} question a little bit of everything. To me, that makes history even more interesting." It does for readers of this book, too.The author's afterword in this book is one of the most gracious I've ever read, and even the "Reader's Guide" in my edition features a discussion by Kurson, Chatterton and Kohler that demonstrates how close and honest their relationship became. The result is an unlikely page turner, full of treasure of a different kind for the reader.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Great story -thrilling and suspenseful - but it just had a bit too much ego to be a super top-notch book. The story itself was awesome and, fortunately, the ego-stroking of the incredibly unbelievably great guys is not overwhelming. (just distracting)
    • 5/5
      This is a riveting, well written story about divers who discovered a U-boat sunk off of the New Jersey coast and their quest to identify the U-boat. It reads like a novel but in this situation, real live is more exciting and dangerous. I knew vertually nothing about wreck diving or deep sea diving and this story educates without overdoing it for novices. It grabbed my attention from the beginning and at times I could not read fast enough. It also touches on the personal side of war as one of the main divers becomes obsessed with finding the familes of the men lost on the U-boat and the sadness of losing young men in what was a losing cause.
    • 5/5
      Gripping story and insight into the world of deep scuba diving and the pursuit of a great treasure: historical facts.
    • 5/5
      This is an incredible book. An amazing story, well written - adventure, tragedy, history, likeable characters. The story will appeal to anyone. No need for an interest in diving or history. 
    • 4/5
      My husband and I got certified to scuba dive this past spring and I absolutely love it but I have to say that I am incredibly grateful that I didn't read this book before we took our classes. Holy toledo! The bends are a magnitude of 100 times worse than I ever imagined. But being underwater is phenomenal. I don't know that I'd ever want to do deep wreck diving; I'm probably more than content to always be one of the thousands of recreational divers out there. I will never turn down the chance to read about the men and women who dive on the edge of the knife blade though, risking their very lives, especially if the account is as gripping as Kurson's non-fiction account of the discovery and eventual identification of the mystery German U-boat laying in 230 feet of water off the coast of New Jersey, where no U-boat should have been according to official war accounts. Kurson follows the two divers who were most instrumental in the identification of the U-boat, two men who initially disliked each other but came to respect the driving force behind their different desires to dive the wreck, put a name to it, and to honor the sailors who were forever trapped in their watery grave. Kurson weaves dramatic tension throughout his narrative, even ratcheting it up as he presents the terrible tragedies of first Steve Feldman's death and then Chris and Chrissy Rouse's. He never minimizes the risks taken by all of the divers although his main focus remains on Vietnam vet John Chatterton, who ultimately pulled the spare parts box that would identify the wreck and Richie Kohler, who felt such a responsibility to the long dead sailors that he traveled to Germany to meet with their families. Kurson does tend to neglect many of the other divers, especially those on the initial dives, mentioning their names briefly but without offering any suggestion of their impressions or contributions. However, his laser focus on Chatterton and Kohler makes for a tight and thrilling narrative that will keep readers, even those with zero knowledge of diving, on the edge of their seats. His descriptions of the dangers inherent in deep water diving, especially in the 90's, before nitrox mixes gained ascendency for such dives, are absolutely heart pounding. And he is spot on when detailing the swirling mess of sediment that contributes to zero visibility. Kurson does not shy away from graphic descriptions of the physical effects of the bends or from the vision of what a drowned body would look like after 5 months in the water and these descriptions will induce horror indeed but they reinforce the dangers and their potential results to which these wreck divers willingly and repeatedly expose themselves. The book is not all diving though; it is also an historical mystery and Kurson takes the reader along as, much to the dismay of Chatterton and Kohler, each credible theory about the identity of the U-boat falls apart. As the wreck continued to withhold its secrets, the divers had to do archival research and in the process discovered that history as it is written is not always accurate and true. And as they waded through both the factual and the murky, they learn quite a bit about U-boats themselves. At the end of the narrative, as the quest for the boat's identity is coming to its conclusion, Kurson also draws a very credible picture of life on this particular U-boat as well as the lives of the lost crew members. The writing is polished and the story exciting. I gulped the book down in a little over a day, pulled ever onward by the mystery and the persistence of these men. Dramatic and intense, this was a cracking good read. I just hope the image of what happens to your blood in extreme cases of the bends fades from my head before I have the chance to put a regulator in my mouth again.
    • 5/5
      Wow I enjoyed this book, it's unusually good. The movie is coming out in 2013. A mystery drives the book forward, a mystery so difficult to crack but compelling it kills a few people who try to solve it. Along the way we learn tons of interesting things about wreck diving, diving culture, WWII submarines, Vietnam, historiography (the creation of history), modern U-boat culture, and much else. I was sorry when it ended but enjoyed the trip. One of my fav books of the year.
    • 5/5
      This is one of those rare books that, for me, was truly, un-put-down-able. The rest of life seemed a bit like filler until I got back to it. Luckily, it is a fairly quick read and I only lost two days of my life. But it was time well spent. This book is just awesome, gripping, educational and just downright interesting on many levels. It has been summarized many times, so I will not do that again. But I think what isn't said too much is how this is so much more than a story about some divers finding a U-boat. It touches on what exactly is history, how it gets recorded and whether it can even be trusted, how to think outside the box when all the fax lead you inside of it, what drives a man to extremes to solve life's mysteries and one of the themes that came up time and time again is how who we are is truly told in times of struggle. I loved the backgrounds and lives of the divers as well as the WWII/U-Boat history and mystery. There is also fascinating folklore about deep sea Altlantic wreck divers and the whole weird culture of it ~ where one small panic can easily cause death, but respect is earned for a lifetime. Kurson is a great writer for the subject matter and he really made every scene come alive. My Dad was not kidding when he said, "You will find yourself holding your breath at times." Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      This book tells the story of several divers who explored the wreck of a German World War II submarine off the coast of New Jersey, and especially of two divers who worked to identify the U-boat. The author writes well, although I found it somewhat breathless, and the chapters on the German submariners (who all perished, save for one man left behind in Germany for medical reasons) turn a pointless waste of lives into a kind of brutally sentimental heroism. Although the American divers are presented sympathetically, most of them have demons of one kind or another - some are killed by their demons, others by horrible diving accidents. If you stop to think about it, you can see just how much skill the author has, to have arranged the story in a way that emphasizes heroism and presents the identification of the U-boat as a triumph. An equally valid but more bitter telling would emphasize the codes of masculinity that drove both the German sailors and the American divers to place themselves at such great risk, and ask whether identifying this submarine really did anything to redeem either set of losses. As one who is totally unfamiliar with the culture of deep sea diving, I was also struck by the tomb-robbing element of the dives -- the archeologists I know would be utterly disgusted at that kind of approach to artifacts on land, and I wondered what an aquatic archeologist would make of this book.
    • 5/5
      Off I went again...reading a book on a subject I have absolutely no interest in...recommended by a friend I trust. I am so glad I took her word for it. An absolutely enthralling book that hooked me right from the first chapter. The story about finding a submarine off the Jersey Shore and the struggle over years to identify it was definitely a page-turner. Its also a story about how this project brought two men who started out not really liking each other together with a common attachment to the project for different reasons. I enjoyed it so much I rented the NOVA presentation of "Hitler's Lost U-Boat" mentioned in the Epilogue) from the library just to see more of this great story.
    • 5/5
      Shadow Divers is one of the most compelling pieces of non-fiction I've ever read. With elements of a fictional thriller -- including a haunting mystery, extreme danger and driving (or diving) obsessions -- readers will wonder why on earth two men would risk their lives repeatedly to identify an enemy U-boat and, at the same time, admire their commitment to the dead men left on board.
    • 5/5
      What makes people take the type of risks they do? This is a true adventure story that rivals fiction with intense action. This is a true adventure story about a group of deep wreck divers, who discover a sunken German U-boat sixty miles off the New Jersey coast. It becomes an amazing story, as two of the most prominent divers, try to unravel the mysteries of this lost sub, taking many years and costing several lives in their relentless quest. This author immerses the reader in deep diving culture, which is both thrilling and very deadly. Highly recommended! Every once and awhile you read a really great book. This was one.
    • 5/5
      Every once and awhile you read a really great book. This was one. What makes people take the type of risks they do? I saw the PBS special based on the book and still read this. It was interesting and informative.
    • 4/5
      A true adventure story that rivals fiction with intense action. I was glad to get this recommendation from an associate and find that it contained everything requested. This story about two deep-sea wreck divers and their passionate commitment to research and discovery in the face of extreme danger is remarkable in its coverage of real persons, the technical aspects of deep-wreck diving and historical events, all at once. So much to learn and experience along the way to solving the mystery of a Nazi U-boat sunk just 60 miles off the coast of New Jersey. A good choice for the adventure reader.
    • 3/5
      Got this one from Audible. Took me quite a while to finish it. It was OK, not the best adventure book, but good.
    • 5/5
      Loved this account - so interesting. I learned a lot about diving but got to read a book that read like a novel.