Technical Diving in Depth by B. R. Wienke

A long-awaited and much-needed title has just been released by BPC. "Technical Diving in Depth" by Bruce R. Wienke is the most complete and comprehensive reference work published to date on technical diving.

It contains a mixture of technical topics, with each one self-contained and developed in relationship to diving. The topics span many disciplines and focus on a number of technical arenas.

Topics Include:
Thermodynamics, pressure and density, mechanics, gas kinetics, free and dissolved phase transfer, energy and matter interactions, nucleation and cavitation, bubbles and surfactants, oxygen dose, gas mixtures, buoyancy, gauges and tanks, compressors and regulators, maladies and drugs, statistics, risk and probability, binomial distributions, waves, transport, currents, geology, oceanography, geophysics, solar energy and radiation. References and Appendix are also included.

Targeted Audience:
Technical diver, commercial diver, diving instructor, underwater researcher, doctors, hyperbaric technicians, physiologist, physicist, chemist, mathematician, engineer or biologist.

Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

This is one of those rare books that you know within the first dozen pages it's going to be a great read and you're going to be disappointed when it ends. Robert Kurson's tremendous research combined with a great historical narrative style results in learning not only about the lives of the living players such as Chatterton and Kohler, but the dead sailors on the submarine as well.

While this is Kurson's book, you can see the extensive contribution provided by Chatterton, Kohler and others who shared the experience. This book fits beautifully with "The Last Dive", which I reviewed here a few years ago. I did learn things here, which surprised me relative to "The Last Dive". I thought they had been doing mixed-gas diving much longer on U-869 then just before the Rouse's arrival. Chapter 2 is about the dangers of wreck diving and sets the stage of what to expect throughout the remainder of the book.

Kurson makes sure the reader understands this wasn't just a bunch of treasure hunters looking for some "stuff". These guys respected this dive site as sacred resting place for these German sailors and their actions (including their own research) supported that belief. And in the end, I was right...it was a disappointment to see it end.