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, theirdives 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.

Reviews

"Bigger than huge," insists the publicist: efforts by two divers to raise a U-boat from deep waters off the New Jersey coast-where historians insisted no U-boat could be. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kurson's chronicle of an extraordinary deep-sea discovery makes for a captivating audio experience. In 1991, divers John Chatterton and Rich Kohler came across the buried remains of a German submarine just off the coast of New Jersey. Unable to identify the ship and mystified as to its origins, the two men became obsessed with learning where the U-boat came from and what brought it to the bottom of the sea. Although the story's set-up, which comprises most of the first disc, drags, the pace picks up when the partners begin traveling the world, digging up clues. Reader Scott uses character voices but keeps them subdued, even when dealing with the salty language of the seamen. This is a wise move, since there's plenty of drama inherent in the text; lengthy and detailed passages describing deep-water dives, and the horrible things that can go wrong with them, evoke mental pictures that are atmospheric and downright claustrophobic at times. A segment featuring interviews with Chatterton and Kohler rounds out this satisfying audio edition. Simultaneous release with the Random House hardcover (Forecasts, Mar. 29). (July) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Adult/High School-Written with the assistance of the two wreck divers who played major roles in identifying a sunken German U-boat, Kurson paints a dynamic, page-turning picture of determination and compulsion to solve a mystery. Wreck divers risk their lives to find and examine shipwrecks, sometimes retrieving artifacts, but often coming away with just a glimpse of once-majestic ships. So it was with the attempt to determine if unexpectedly large catches of fish off the New Jersey coast reflected the existence of a shipwreck. Teens will be fascinated with the process of locating and identifying the wreck and even making contact with relatives of the original sailors. The wreck was of a vessel that did not appear in any U.S. records of the antisubmarine war. The search of those records provided not only exciting military history, but also valuable information on the evolution of diving. Kurson vividly shows how small groups of determined individuals can extend their reach and achieve goals that many thought impossible. Black-and-white photographs of the original German sailors contrast with color pictures of the search and retrieval of their U-boat and effectively unite the participants yet again.-Ted Woodcock, George Mason University, Arlington, VA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

"An engrossing saga of the suspenseful, intriguing, and dangerous underwater investigation of a Mystery U-boat."
-CLIVE CUSSLER
"Robert Kurson's Shadow Divers, about the divers exploring a sunken shipwreck off the New Jersey coast, is a gripping account of real-life adventurers and a real-life mystery. In addition to being compellingly readable on every page, the book offers a unique window on the deep, almost reckless nature of the human quest to know."
-SCOTT TUROW, author of Reversible Errors
"A tremendously suspenseful story of discovery that comes as close as any book could to providing the reader with approximate sensations of deep sea diving and of life on a submarine at war, and that leaves us with a hell of an impression of the grit, guts, and compassion of a U-boat crew and the two American divers who risked everything to solve the mystery of their last mission."
-JOHN MCCAIN, author of Faith of My Fathers and Why Courage Matters

"Robert Kurs