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Title: Lost Subs by Spencer Dunmore, Jonathan Blair, Brian Skerry ISBN: 0-306-81140-5 Publisher: DaCapo Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Light-weight history, but gorgeous images
Comment: Lost Subs isn't heavy-duty history by anyone's standards. Skimming lightly over material covered more completely in scholarly books, Lost Subs allows its pictures to do the heavy lifting, and what a wise choice that is! Lavishly illustrated, Lost Subs covers wrecked boats of every era, and provides limited, but relevent background on each era along with discussion of the individual wrecks. Drawings, paintings, and photos bring to ghostly life boats both famous and obscure.
To this former submariner, this book feels more like a tour of historic graveyards, complete with color commentary on the 'lives, times, and families' of the deceased boats, than it does academic 'History.' All submariners fear ending their lives on the bottom of the sea, though we don't discuss it much. This book shows another side to such an fate, in the remembrance of those who come after. These boats, these gravestones in the deep, punctuate and anchor that remembrance.
If you want scholarly depth, or stirring stories of war, go elsewhere. If you want to remember the lost or reflect on the fate of the men who trusted their lives to the deep, then Lost Subs is the book for you.
Rating: 4
Summary: For Those in Peril on the Sea
Comment: If you are looking for a quick overview of the history of submarines and submarine disasters, "Lost Subs" provides several hours of interesting reading.
The book describes the historical development of the submarine, from Bushnell's Turtle and Fulton's Nautilus, through the Hunley, the Holland, and the U-boats of the two World Wars, and on to the nuclear boats of the Cold War. The text is filled with photographs of submarine wreckage and rescue efforts, dramatic paintings of submarines at sea, and diagrams showing how sumarines work. Especially interesting is a detailed recreation of the CSS Hunley's pyrrhic victory against the hapless USS Housatonic during the American Civil War, together with some interesting speculation about why the Hunley sank after its successful attack.
The book's main weakness is that it surveys a big field that has been thoroughly covered in other works. If you enjoy digging into the details, this book may disappoint you. But if you like your maritime narratives to be accompanied by dramatic and often moving photographs and paintings, "Lost Subs" will be a very enjoyable adventure.
If you would like to explore the subject in more detail, try:
Peter Hutchhausen, "Hostile Waters" (a near catstrophe when a Soviet boomer experiences a missile tube failure);
Brayton Harris "The Navy Times Book of Submarines: A Political, Social and Military History" (everything you always wanted to know about the history of submarines, from the 1620s on)
Edwin Gray, "Few Survived: A History of Submarine Disasters" (the title says it all)
John Craven, "The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea"
Sontag & Drew, "Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage" (hard to put down)
Hicks & Kropf, "Raising the Hunley: The Remarkable History and Recovery of the Lost Confederate Submarine"
Rating: 5
Summary: Sailor Rest Your Oar
Comment: From the Civil War submarine Hunley through the 2000 sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk, this 176-page medium format book has eight chapters about the loss and subsequent discovery or recovery of several famous American, Russian German, Japanese, British, Australian and Israeli submarines. By far the best feature of the book is the large quantity of well-reproduced paintings and photographs. There are terrific paintings depicting nighttime images of the CSS Hunley stalking the USS Housatonic in Charleston Harbor in 1864 and dramatic paintings of German U-Boats stalking their prey in the stormy WWI-WWII Atlantic. The most unique and haunting images are underwater photographs of sea growth-encrusted submarines taken on research and archeological expeditions around the world. There is a small bibliography, list of relevant websites and source for each reproduced painting or photo.
I recommend this book. While not providing full details on any of these famous incidents (virtually all the submarines are the topic of at least one full book and numerous articles) this book is a good overview for anyone interested in naval and submarine history. It makes a photographic/painting supplement for the more demanding submarine researcher or buff.
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Title: Dark Waters: An Insider's Account of the NR-1, the Cold War's Undercover Nuclear Sub by Lee Vyborny, Don Davis ISBN: 0451207777 Publisher: New American Library Pub. Date: 07 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: A Time to Die : The Untold Story of the Kursk Tragedy by Robert Moore ISBN: 0609610007 Publisher: Crown Pub. Date: 14 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Under Pressure: The Final Voyage of Submarine S-5 by A. J. Hill ISBN: 0743236777 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: August, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Return to Midway: The Quest to Find the Yorktown and the Other Lost Ships from the Pivotal Battle of the Pacific War by Robert D. Ballard, Rick Archbold, Ken Marschall ISBN: 0792275004 Publisher: National Geographic Pub. Date: October, 1999 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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Title: Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage by Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, Annette Lawrence Drew ISBN: 006103004X Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 06 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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