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

"I began my quest for a writing career after quitting a lucrative practice as an attorney," Robert Kurson told us in our interview. "I hated being a lawyer, so I was willing to do whatever was necessary in order to break into writing, a profession I (rightly) suspected I would love." Given the success of his bestselling nonfiction books Shadow Divers and Crashing Through, it seems safe to say that Kurson made the right call.

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 marriagesfrayed 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.

New York Times Sunday Book Review - Mark Bowen

Exploring deep-sea shipwrecks is not for the fainthearted. Kurson lays it out in an early chapter entitled ''Zero Viz,'' a masterpiece of explication. It familiarizes you with the tools and methods of the sport and manages to evoke both the dangers and the thrills. It is artfully written -- objects at the sea bottom are ''sweatered in sea anemones,'' and when a man is trapped in a shipwreck, ''his brain starts to think in declaratives, not ideas. I'm gonna die! Get out! Get out!'' These passages set the scene for the intense drama to come, and at the same time help you understand how much is at stake when men like Chatterton and Kohler return again and again to test their skills and their judgment, quite literally, under pressure.