Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers

Amazon tells me that I bought this book in June of 2005. It's sat on my shelf for 15 years, just waiting for its time in the sun. Happily, that time finally came. I've never been interested in deep wreck diving, but, man, as Robert Kurson tells it, the subject is absolutely fascinating. Kurson brings readers into this alien (for most of us) world with detailed discussions that are always edifying and often poetic. I love it when nonfiction authors unpack unfamiliar subjects and make technical details easy for readers to understand.

So what have I learned in this one? Fishermen jealously guard the geographic coordinates of secret shipwrecks because that's where the good fishing is. A two-hour deep dive may require a decompression period—the diver's ascent to the surface along an anchor line—of some nine hours. If divers stay down too long, their judgment can become impaired enough by nitrogen narcosis that they'll make stupid decisions that will get them killed. Or they may become paranoid enough to kill a diving partner. Who knew?

And all that's before the author even gets to the juicy stuff, his meticulously researched real-life account of his subjects' discovery and exploration of one fisherman's secret wreck, which turned out to be a German U-boat sunk 60 miles off the New Jersey shore. Its discovery in 1991 was followed by years of trying to identify the boat, which was made especially difficult because there was no historical record of any U-boat in the vicinity in which this one was found. Shadow Divers is nonfiction at its finest. It's beautifully written—by which I mean that the sentences themselves are often lovely—and written in precise language. It teaches readers a lot. And beyond that, it's a great story.