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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 | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert Kurson
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Category: Book
List Price: $7.50
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Avg. Customer Rating:  283 reviews
Sales Rank: 13981
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 6.9 x 4.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0345482476
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5451
EAN: 9780345482471
ASIN: 0345482476
Publication Date: May 31, 2005
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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.
Download Description
CHAPTER ONE
THE BOOK OF NUMBERS
Brielle, New Jersey, September 1991
Bill Nagle's life changed the day a fisherman sat beside him in a ramshackle bar and told him about a mystery he had found lying at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Against his better judgment, that fisherman promised to tell Nagle how to find it. The men agreed to meet the next day on the rickety wooden pier that led to Nagle's boat, the Seeker, a vessel Nagle had built to chase possibility. But when the appointed time came, the fisherman was not there. Nagle paced back and forth, careful not to plunge through the pier where its wooden planks had rotted away. He had lived much of his life on the Atlantic, and he knew when worlds were about to shift. Usually, that happened before a storm or when a man's boat broke. Today, however, he knew it was going to happen when the fisherman handed him a scrap of paper, a hand-scrawled set of numbers that would lead to the sunken mystery. Nagle looked into the distance for the fisherman. He saw no one. The salt air blew against the small seashore town of Brielle, tilting the dockside boats and spraying the Atlantic into Nagle's eyes. When the mist died down he looked again. This time, he saw the fisherman approaching, a small square of paper crumpled in his hands. The fisherman looked worried. Like Nagle, he had lived on the ocean, and he also knew when a man's life was about to change.
In the whispers of approaching autumn, Brielle's rouge is blown away and what remains is the real Brielle, the locals' Brielle. This small seashore town on the central New Jersey coast is the place where the boat captains and fishermen live, where convenience store owners stay open to serve neighbors, where fifth graders can repair scallop dredges. This is where the hangers-on and wannabes and also-rans and once-greats keep believing in the sea. In Brielle, when the customers leave, the town's lines show, and they are the kind grooved by the thin dif
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| Customer Reviews: Read 278 more reviews...
 Must read for divers August 21, 2008
This is a fantastic book. I have read it several times. I am a dive instructor and have given this book as gifts to students. Everyone has loved it. I have given it over 10 times. One of my favorite gifts to give to my divemaster students. I am buying it again today as a gift for an open water student who got some bonus questions correct. Mike Bannon
Great true Adventure Read July 7, 2008
Even though most people seem to know the outcome. (I didn't) it was a great summer read. There is still some question as to how the sub got there but who cares? This book is not about the US Navy doing an archeology study, it's about a couple of guys who love to dive who get a hold of a story and go have a look. Then spend several years figuring out what it is that they are looking at. Plus people die in this tale, so obviously what they are doing gives them enough of an adrenaline rush to make it worth doing. For the rest of us, it's a page burner summer read.
And heck if you want, you can hire a boat and a dive master and go look yourself. I'll be running a submersible with a camera from the boat though.
An amazing read June 30, 2008
This is a wonderfully written tale that not only brings you face to face with deep sea diving and exploration and the dangers that go with it but also the perils faced by WW2 submariners.
If you like a good adventure then give Shadow Divers a read, after a few pages you won't be able to put it down until you finally know who U-Who really is.
 Sad June 29, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Yes they identified the U-Who. But they so embellished the rest of the story that another author needed to come out and expose it.
As Exciting as Any Dive I Have Been On. June 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Short on air, I'll be brief. I took this book to Blackbird Caye Resort, Belize, on a SCUBA vacation. Once started, it hooked me in, to the point I only put it down for meals and to prep for my next dive. There are 248 other reviews to inform you of the story content. Let me just add, if you buy this book, read this book, and don't like this book, you have my permission to flame this review and spit in my dive mask.
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