Shadow Divers (2004)

Great story -thrilling and suspenseful - but it just had too much ego to be a super top-notch book. The story itself was awesome but, wow, the ego-stroking of the incredibly, unbelievably, stunningly, super intelligent, all-around great guys is just a little overwhelming. Still it was a good story. ( )

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. ( )

This book combined many of my interests and knowledge. I always like reading about nautical adventures and I have worked as an archivist for nearly twenty years. I enjoyed reading how Chatterton and Kohler researched the history of World War II German U-boats and how they gathered evidence from the submarine to discover the truth. ( )

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. ( )

Is it possible for a book to be more than excellent? If so, this is the one. Being a genealogist I can appreciate the hunger for going to the source; deep down inside knowing that there's more, there's more- there's a piece that doesn't fit or is missing and I have to search. For me, as for these divers, it's the archives, the newspapers, the files, anything and everything. But these divers got to experience what I never will- actual hands-on, literally. This story is so eloquently told that it's impossible not to be with these men in the darkness, in the silt, in the sub, on the anchor line. The ending is explosive- an Oh,my God! According to the inside flyleaf, The Dallas Morning News wrote, "The phrase 'page-turner' is bandied about too cheaply, but Shadow Divers is the real thing." How true. ( )