Book Review: Shadow Divers
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.
Tale of several adventurous deep-sea divers who discover a U-boat some 60 miles off the coast of New Jersey. The sacrifice and work required to identify the boat correctly and give peace to the families of the deceased is a worthy read. Superb storytelling and character development. If you’re looking for a summer escape read, look here.
What I loved about this book in this current moment are timeless themes that we often talk about in this newsletter. How what we do is personal. How history matters. That having a code of principles that extend beyond yourself is important.
As well as a theme of forgiveness for past grievances.
As the divers explore the U-boat and frantically search for identification, they uncover the remains of the German seaman who went down with the iron coffin. They treat them with respect. One of the divers tracks down family members of the deceased and provided them with artifacts and closure. That's human.
To dive at 200 ft, you have to be a little crazy. But also a master at clearing your mind and not allowing your emotions to get the best of you. Here are the principles of the lead diver of the discovery, John :
If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it.
If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving.
Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these, and you become average.
Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a person must decide to stop or go. A person lives with these decisions forever.
Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you.
It is easy to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong.
The guy who gets killed is often the guy who got nervous.
The worst possible decision is to give up.