Shadow Divers is a very entertaining book about some New Jersey divers who find an unknown German U-Boat and set out on a journey to identify it. If you aren't familiar with the story, you should be: check out Shadow Divers. It is an amazing story that is BASED on a true story. The heroes of the story are legendary divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler. I absolutely loved this book and everyone that I have shared it with has loved it. And then I did some more reading and that's when I realized that there might have been some embellishments in the story.
If you have read Shadow Divers and don't want to ruin your perception of the story then you should just stop here (I often wish I hadn't read more). WARNING: There will be spoilers in the following content.
The next book that I read was The Last Dive - which is a story about the Rouses (the father-son pair who died in Shadow Divers). This book is also an excellent read. The two stories overlap when the Rouses died diving on the mystery U-Boat. The basic story of the tragic dive is the same between the two accounts (both of which are essentially Chatterton's account) with one glaring difference: Shadow Divers has Chatterton trying to convince the rescue crew to leave the dad (Chris) and take the son (Chrissy); while The Last Dive has Chatterton convincing them to take both. Seems like a small detail, but I thought it was odd that the two stories had opposite renditions of this point. I did some looking online and nobody had a great answer as to which was the truth. But, my heroes were still heroes.
Then I read Shadow Divers Exposed. As you can guess from the title, the version of the story from this book is wildly different from that told in Shadow Divers. Many of the heroics attributed to Chatterton and Kohler were actually performed by other people. The book is much less fun to read, but is worth it if you are into knowing the actual truth. For the most part, it comes across as a childish attack by the author (Gary Gentile) against people who ended up being more successful than he did.
If you are interested in these sorts of books, check out the reviews at http://www.trueadventurebooks.com.