Shadow Divers
Shadow Divers is a riveting true 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 hallucination, navigating through a minefield of perilous wreckage, they pushed themselves to their limits and beyond, brushing against death often in the rusting hulks of sunken ships. But in 1991, not even these bold divers were prepared for what they found 230 feet below the surface, in the frigid Atlantic waters sixty miles off the New Jersey coast: 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 sediment. Over the next six years, an elite team of divers embarked on a quest to solve the mystery. Some 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 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. Shadow Divers spent 24 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list, peaking at #2.
Stats for nerds
18recommend
22mentions
22people
2010–2026years
82% recommend18% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Just finished up the first two Game of Thrones book. Before continuing wanted to check out a couple of other books.
Read Shadow Divers which was really good. Saw it suggested a lot and it did not disappoint.
Now reading The Pearl by Steinbeck and Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers by Grant Naylor.
- Robert Kurson's diving books (Shadow Divers and Pirate Hunters) are some of the best books on startups I've ever read. They're stories about some of the most ambitious wreck divers out there.
It might not seem analogous, but there's a lot of parallels, i.e. you have limited air (aka runway), you need to choose the people on your expedition wisely and can't bring too many, you need to be extremely ambitious (seeking more than just touristy diving), etc.
The writing is incredible, too.
- list of (most of) the books mentioned in this thread so far. I tried reading every comment but used chatGPT instead.
1. The Big Rich - Texas oil boom.
2. Barbarians at the Gate - Private equity origins.
3. Masters of Doom - John Carmack and Id Software.
4. Einstein by Walter Isaacson - Einstein's discoveries.
5. Houdini!!! - The escape artist and magician.
6. The Double Helix - DNA discovery.
7. Stress Test by Tim Geithner - Financial crisis.
8. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl - Concentration camp survival.
9. The Chariots of Apollo - NASA's space program.
10. Across the Airless Wilds by Earl Swift - Development of the moon buggy.
11. Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox - Apollo missions.
12. The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr - Food supply chains.
13. The Prize by Daniel Yergin - Oil industry evolution.
14. Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson - Ambitious wreck divers.
15. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes - Manhattan Project.
16. American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin - Robert Oppenheimer.
17. Conquistador by Buddy Levy - Hernán Cortés and the Aztecs.
18. Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner - Water infrastructure in the American West.
19. The Wright Brothers by David McCullough - The invention of flight.
20. Walt Disney by Neal Gabler - Vision and innovation in entertainment.
21. Tuxedo Park by Jennet Conant - Invention of radar.
22. Insisting on the Impossible - Edwin Land and instant photography.
23. The Logic of Failure - Understanding and avoiding failure.
24. The Big Short by Michael Lewis - 2008 financial crisis.
25. The Box by Marc Levinson - Shipping container revolution.
26. Latitude by Nicholas Crane - Cartography innovations.
27. When the Heavens Went on Sale by Ashlee Vance - Space startups.
28. The Founders by Jimmy Soni - PayPal's early days.
29. The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester - Precision engineering.
30. The Little Engine That Could - Children's classic.
31. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - Success mechanics.
32. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight - Founding of Nike.
33. Black Hole Blues by Janna Levin - Building LIGO.
34. Freedom’s Forge - WWII industry mobilization.
35. Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes - Electrification by Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse.
36. The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough - Panama Canal construction.
37. Annapurna by Maurice Herzog - Climbing a Himalayan peak.
38. Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder - Data General engineers.
39. Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary - Development of Windows NT.
40. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand - WWII survival.
41. The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder - Defining the meter.
42. The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll - Tracking a hacker.
43. The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel - Srinivasa Ramanujan.
44. The Power Broker by Robert Caro - Robert Moses and New York infrastructure.
45. How Big Things Get Done - Large-scale project execution.
46. Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik - Xerox PARC.
47. Built by Roma Agrawal - Civil engineering insights.
48. The Will to Keep Winning by Daigo Umehara - Competitive gaming.
49. Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold - Low-temperature physics.
50. Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins - Apollo 11.
- Shadow Divers (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9530.Shadow_Divers) - story of amateur deep sea divers who discover a sunken German U-Boat and spend years trying to get into it. Genuinely riveting story, absolute nutters operating at the edge of what’s possible (and what should be done?).
- Shadow Divers was amazing: https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Divers-Adventure-Americans-Eve...
The Tiger was also amazing: https://www.amazon.com/Tiger-Vengeance-Survival-Vintage-Depa...
Both non-fiction
- Shadow Divers is a good book, but the subjects were hardly the first to use helium mixes to counteract narcosis. That goes back to US military experiments in the 1920s.
