by Robert Kurson
When I was a kid, I’d watch TV shows like Sea Hunt and movies like Thunderball. I would eagerly anticipate the undersea action scenes. And then I’d be underwhelmed by what I saw.
Not even Sean Connery as James Bond could inject much life into the sluggish scuba-diving scenes in Thunderball.
Which brings me to Shadow Divers, Robert Kurson’s chronicle of “one of the last mysteries of WWII.” Having read the book, I think back to those shows I watched as a kid and speculate. Do some things simply translate better on the page than on the screen?
Pros: Kurson delivers numerous tense, claustrophobic episodes in which “wreck divers” attempt to identify a World War II U-boat languishing on the bottom of the ocean near New Jersey. People die in these watery excursions. Kurson makes the reader feel as though he’s with them, 230 feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic.
Cons: To a landlubber like me, the stakes of this pursuit (aside from perishing on the ocean bottom) don’t seem all that high. We are told that the two heroes of Kurson’s tale want most of all to bring “closure” to descendants of the submarine’s crew. But does it matter that much to learn that grandpa died off the coast of New Jersey, rather than off the coast of Gibraltar?
I suspect the divers’ motives might have been a tad more self-serving than simply providing closure.
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