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I didn't get it. I was a little disapointed in this book. I was expecting a diary of events relating to the discovery of all the lost ships.
They are well written, move along quickly, and characters and plots are easy to follow. Clive Cussler.his writings are always a pleasure to read.
There is no insight into the real work and presumably colorful side stories that grow out of the efforts to recover these fascinating and so often poignantly lost ships. More true adventures with famous shipwrecks.I read this book on the heels of the much better The White Rock: An Exploration of the Inca Heartland by Hugh Thomson on the theme of lost history and adventures to recover it, and was sorely disappointed. From the start Cussler's flippant arrogance mars the accounts of his and his company National Underwater Marine Agency (NUMA)--but mostly his.--efforts to find various shipwrecks.And it doesn't get better--sketchily researched and amateurishly written recaps of the shipwreck stories, which might be forgiven if the stories of the NUMA recovery efforts were better--but they're not.
His characters are humanistic and his stories are absolutely plausable which is what makes him so good at what he does. Then writes it down with that amazing imagination of his.I am sure there is a readership for his non-fiction, but I am not a fan. First and foremost, let me say I have read EVERYTHING Mr. He takes a bit of historical fact and then sits down and says "What if". I just wonder why someone who is so good at technical novels would write anything else. Cussler has ever published. He is my favorite author and his novels are top notch.
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. 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. Like the first Sea Hunters, it's the story of several shipwrecks. Their failures are included, as is the frustration and discomfort of the time-consuming, often boring searches. Then there's the story of NUMA's search for the wreck. In each chapter, there's first a fictionalized historical account of the ship (or boat or plane or cannon) that demonstrates why it's important and describes how it was lost. Some of the wrecks are famous: the Mary Celeste, JFK's PT109, and some I'd never heard of before.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.
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