Shadow Divers

The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

By: Robert Kurson

Narrated by: Campbell Scott

New York Times BESTSELLER • 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.©2004 Robert Kurson; (P)2004 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

“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 Kurson’s status as an undiscovered pleasure among Chicago readers is about to change, I suspect, in a hurry. Shadow Divers is so culturally astute and terrifyingly suspenseful that it should reach the sort of audience John Berendt, Susan Orlean, Jon Krakauer and Laura Hillenbrand have recently earned. Kurson’s new focus is the larger historical world--a world of U-Boats, forensics and lung-crushing pressure—and his prose is, as always, plain gorgeous.”—James McManus, author of Positively Fifth Street

“A winning tale exceedingly well told, Shadow Divers takes us on a dangerous and seemingly quixotic descent into the murk–and then, in a fog of nitrogen narcosis, brings us back to the surface with a richer, fuller fathoming of a history we only thought we knew.”—Hampton Sides, author of Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission

Campbell Scott is the best narrator of all time.

Any additional comments?

I will listen to anything narrated by Campbell Scott. He truly has one of the greatest voices of all time. This listen was fantastic. The story is fascinating and the production was done really well. We do not often discover a German u-boat at the bottom of the sea that was previously unaccounted for. The story is exciting, the action is dangerous, and the people left an emotional impression on me. I will definitely be listening again. Really loved this one.

Excellent!

Fascinating story. Well-read and moves along well.

gripping

well worth your time. it's a mystery-adventure story.

Wow!

I hesitated to jump into this book as I expected it to be on the dry side. I was wrong! This is easily the best book on tape I've ever heard. It kept me riveted the whole way through. I found myself making up reasons for small car trips so that I could listen to more of it! Even the portions of the book where there is a lot of research going on are exciting because of all of the discoveries that are made. Once you understand things the way the divers do it makes each trip to the wreck much more exciting!

Shadow Divers

Awesome book! I think this is a great book. I love how the history came alive. The reader did a great job. The one bad thing is the "F" word is used multiple times. I have a 16 year old that would love the book, but can't listen because of this.