cover image Lost Subs: From the Hunley to the Kursk, the Greatest Submarines Ever Lost-And Found

Lost Subs: From the Hunley to the Kursk, the Greatest Submarines Ever Lost-And Found

Spencer Dunmore. Da Capo Press, $16.95 (176pp) ISBN 978-0-306-81140-1

Every few years, perhaps thanks to movies like The Hunt for Red October or Titanic, there's a groundswell of interest in bottom-of-the-ocean booty. But year in and year out, there are those who find the subject compelling regardless, those for whom ploughing through stories of the ocean's ferocity and man's folly is treasure enough. This illustrated history is for them. ""From poor, primitive Hunley a Confederate sub that was ""essentially an overgrown boiler"" to the atomic submarine Kursk,"" Dunmore (In Great Waters) shares tales of disasters, recoveries and subsequent investigations. Full of archival photos, illustrations, diagrams and lushly colored paintings, all packed around nautical stories of warfare and bad luck, this volume traces a brief history of submarining and some of its more memorable losses. Written in simple yet propulsive prose, the volume paints vivid characters caught in treacherous, suffocating circumstances, and never skimps on the details of the technology.