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Biography & Autobiography. History. Military. Nonfiction. HTML:The second thrilling account of #1 New York Times bestselling author Clive Cusslers's real-life search for lost ships, planes, and other marvels that changed history. For decades, Clive Cusslerâ??s real-life NUMA®, the National Underwater and Marine Agency, has scoured rivers and seas in search of lost ships of historic significance. His teams have been inundated by tidal waves and beset by obstaclesâ??both human and naturalâ??but the results, and the stories behind them, have been dramatic. In this follow-up to their bestselling first account, The Sea Hunters, Cussler and colleague Craig Dirgo provide another extraordinary narrative of their true seagoingâ??and landâ??adventures, including their searches for the famous ghost ship Mary Celeste, found floating off the Azores in 1874 with no one on board; the Carpathia, the ship that rescued the Titanic survivors and was itself lost to U-boats six years later; and Lâ??Oiseau Blanc, the airplane that almost beat The Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic before disappearing in the Maine woods. All these, plus steamboats, ironclads, a seventeenth century flagship, a certain famous PT boat, and even a dirigible, are tantalizing targets as Cussler proves again that truth can be â??at least as fun, and sometimes stranger, than fictionâ?ť… (more)
User reviews
The historical sections were just detailed enough to give a layperson (me, in other words) a good background in the wreck's history and significance, and because they were fictional accounts, with the emotional content necessarily absent from straight historical records, it gave me a reason to care about the wreck and about whether they would find it.
Because there are 14 sections, it should be obvious at a glance that there's not going to be enough detail on any one of the wrecks to satisfy a historian or salvage expert, or a serious student of either. Instead, it's meant for people like me, who find the whole thing absolutely fascinating, but who haven't read that extensively or actually done any searching for shipwrecks.
One thing I appreciated about the present-day sections is the lack of pretense. Cussler & co. can apparently be rude or juvenile, and there's no sugar-coating (or maybe there is, and they're actually worse than they sound), no attempt to make them appear all-wise, patient, kind, and infallible. Their failures are included, as is the frustration and discomfort of the time-consuming, often boring searches.