Reading List

Authors Like Robert Kurson

In September 1991 a charter boat took a group of weekend divers to a set of coordinates a fisherman had given its captain, sixty miles off the New Jersey coast. At 230 feet down, in cold water with a few feet of visibility, they found a German U-boat that no record said should be there. Identifying it took John Chatterton and Richie Kohler six years, several trips into the wreck's collapsing interior, archive requests in Germany, and the lives of three divers. Shadow Divers (Random House, 2004) is that search, and it was the American Booksellers Association's non-fiction book of the year in 2005. Kurson qualified as a lawyer at Harvard and practised real estate law before starting at the Chicago Sun-Times as a sports agate clerk; his first magazine piece, in Esquire in 2000, was a National Magazine Award finalist, and a later Esquire profile of a blind speed skier and CIA analyst who regained his sight won the award outright and became Crashing Through (2007). Pirate Hunters (2015) is a search for a seventeenth-century pirate ship; Rocket Men (2018) is Apollo 8, written with the cooperation of all three astronauts. The ten below are chosen on obsession and on what it costs.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Adventure non-fiction · Obsessives and wrecks · Four books · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love Robert Kurson, the closest match is Jon Krakauer: the same physical danger, the same people who cannot stop, and a reporter who understands the technical detail. Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm is the other book Shadow Divers was marketed against. David Grann and Susan Orlean write obsession at book length, Hampton Sides the historical expedition. For the wreck itself, read Mensun Bound. And Bernie Chowdhury's The Last Dive is the same community with the deaths at the centre.

Every book by Robert Kurson →

10 authors like Robert Kurson

01
The same danger, the same compulsion · Closest match

Jon Krakauer

American · Into the Wild (1996), Into Thin Air (1997), Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

Into Thin Air is Krakauer's account of the 1996 Everest season in which eight people died on a single day, written as a climber who was there and who apportions responsibility explicitly. The Kazakh guide Anatoli Boukreev disputed his version and published a rebuttal, The Climb; the argument continued until Boukreev died in an avalanche in 1997. Into the Wild follows a young man who walked into the Alaskan interior with almost nothing and did not come out.

The book Shadow Divers was explicitly sold against, and the comparison holds. Both writers take an activity most readers will never attempt, explain the technical margins — oxygen, nitrogen, decompression, weather — until the danger is legible, and are genuinely interested in why anyone chooses it. Krakauer is harder on his subjects and more willing to say who was at fault, where Kurson admires his divers almost without reservation. That difference is the whole argument about this genre.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jon Krakauer →

Authors like Jon Krakauer →

02
The sea, and the men who go out on it

Sebastian Junger

American · The Perfect Storm (1997), War (2010), Tribe (2016)

The Perfect Storm reconstructs the loss of the swordfishing boat Andrea Gail off Nova Scotia in October 1991 from weather data, radio traffic, other crews and the physics of a wave, since nobody aboard survived to describe it. Junger later spent fourteen months with a platoon in Afghanistan for War and the documentary Restrepo, and wrote Tribe on what veterans miss about deployment.

The other title Shadow Divers was marketed alongside, and the one that solves a harder problem. Junger had no survivors, so the boat's last hours are built entirely from what can be inferred, and he tells you so. Kurson had two men who came back and could describe every dive, which is why his book has more interiority and less mystery. Read The Perfect Storm for the same water at a different pressure.

— Lisanne

Every book by Sebastian Junger →

Authors like Sebastian Junger →

03
The historical expedition

Hampton Sides

American · Ghost Soldiers (2001), In the Kingdom of Ice (2014), The Wide Wide Sea (2024)

In the Kingdom of Ice follows the USS Jeannette, sent north in 1879 on the theory that a warm open sea lay at the pole, and what happened when the ship was crushed and the crew walked out across Siberia. Ghost Soldiers reconstructs the 1945 raid on a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines. Sides blurbed Shadow Divers when it appeared, which tells you the two writers are working the same ground.

The historical version of Kurson's method, and the obvious next step after Rocket Men. Sides builds an expedition out of logbooks and letters with the same forward pull and the same conviction that the physical detail is the story — the ration, the temperature, the failing equipment. He has done it repeatedly and at greater length. If you liked knowing exactly what the divers were breathing, you will like knowing exactly what the Jeannette's crew were eating.

— Lisanne

Every book by Hampton Sides →

04
Obsession, at book length

David Grann

American · The Lost City of Z (2009), Killers of the Flower Moon (2017), The Wager (2023)

Grann has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003 and builds books around one unresolved event: an explorer vanishing into the Amazon and the people who kept going in after him, the murders of Osage people for their oil rights, a British warship wrecked off Patagonia in 1741 whose survivors came home with irreconcilable accounts. Six of his books or articles have been adapted for the screen.

The same subject — people who cannot let a historical question go — written by someone who admits he is one of them. The Lost City of Z is structurally almost identical to Shadow Divers: a mystery, a succession of obsessives who have died pursuing it, and a narrator who ends up in the jungle himself. Grann is the better prose stylist; Kurson is better on the technical craft his subjects have mastered.

— Lisanne

Every book by David Grann →

Authors like David Grann →

05
The eccentric, taken seriously

Susan Orlean

American · The Orchid Thief (1998), The Library Book (2018), Joyride (2025)

The Orchid Thief began as a New Yorker piece about a Florida plant dealer arrested for taking rare orchids out of a state preserve, and became Adaptation (2002). The Library Book is built around the 1986 fire that gutted the Los Angeles Central Library. Her 2025 memoir Joyride is about method: where the ideas come from, and why arriving without expertise is an advantage.

Kurson's subject with the danger removed and the psychology sharpened. Both writers are drawn to people who have organised an entire life around one thing that other people consider trivial — a plant, a wreck — and both refuse to condescend. Orlean is more interested in why the obsession took hold and Kurson in how the obsessive actually operates. Reviewers named her when Shadow Divers came out, and they were right to.

— Lisanne

Every book by Susan Orlean →

Authors like Susan Orlean →

06
The story rebuilt from paper

Laura Hillenbrand

American · Seabiscuit (2001), Unbroken (2010)

Seabiscuit reconstructs a small, undistinguished-looking racehorse who became the biggest American story of 1938, from newspaper archives, race charts and the men around him. Unbroken follows Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner who survived forty-seven days on a raft in the Pacific and then years in Japanese prison camps; Angelina Jolie filmed it in 2014. Both books were adapted and both sold in the millions.

The other great American practitioner of the true story built for maximum forward motion. Hillenbrand works almost entirely from documents and interviews conducted at a distance, and the result is as vivid as Kurson's in-person reporting, which is a useful thing to notice about the form. She is also the better writer of a sentence. If Rocket Men was the Kurson you loved, Unbroken is the book to read next.

— Lisanne
07
Older than the genre · The treasure hunt

Gary Kinder

American · Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (1998)

Kinder follows Tommy Thompson, an engineer from Ohio who spent years working out where the SS Central America had gone down in 1857 with tons of California gold aboard, built the technology to reach it a mile and a half deep, and recovered it in 1988. There is a postscript the book could not include: Thompson later disappeared rather than account to investors, was arrested in Florida in 2015 and has spent years jailed for contempt for refusing to say where a set of recovered gold coins went.

The direct predecessor of Shadow Divers, published six years earlier and working the same seam: an obsessive, a wreck, a technical problem nobody has solved, and years of failure before the payoff. It also contains the warning Kurson's book does not. Reading them together raises the question of what happens to a man after the thing he organised his life around is finally achieved, which is the most interesting unasked question in this genre.

— Lisanne
08
The wreck hunter, from Britain

Mensun Bound

British · The Ship Beneath the Ice (2022)

Bound is a marine archaeologist from the Falkland Islands who was director of exploration for the expeditions that searched the Weddell Sea for Shackleton's Endurance, failing in 2019 and finding her in March 2022, upright and remarkably intact three kilometres down. The Ship Beneath the Ice is his diary of both attempts, including the ice conditions, the equipment losses and the arguments aboard.

The same story as Shadow Divers told by the man in the water rather than a reporter beside him. Bound has spent a career on the identification problem Kurson's divers faced once — which ship is this, and what evidence would settle it — and he is candid about failure, expense and the tedium between discoveries. Read it if the archive work in Shadow Divers gripped you as much as the diving.

— Lisanne
09
After Rocket Men

Andrew Chaikin

American · A Man on the Moon (1994)

A Man on the Moon is the standard history of the Apollo programme, built on interviews with twenty-three of the twenty-four astronauts who flew to the Moon, and it became HBO's From the Earth to the Moon in 1998. Chaikin covers every mission from the fire that killed the Apollo 1 crew through to Apollo 17, with the engineering, the politics and the crews' own accounts of what they saw.

Where to go directly after Rocket Men. Kurson gives you one mission in close-up, with Borman, Lovell and Anders sitting across from him; Chaikin gives you the whole programme and the context that makes Apollo 8's risk legible — why the schedule was so brutal, what the Soviets were doing, how nearly it went wrong. The two together are the best possible pair on the subject.

— Lisanne
10
The argument against him

Bernie Chowdhury

American · The Last Dive (2000)

The Last Dive is about Chris and Chrissy Rouse, a father and son who dived the same unidentified U-boat off New Jersey and both died in 1992 after an accident inside the wreck and a catastrophic ascent. Chowdhury is a technical diver himself, knew them, and writes the deep-wreck community from inside it: the equipment, the rivalries, the accumulating risk and the people left behind. It was published four years before Shadow Divers.

The same wreck, the same men, the same water, with the deaths at the centre instead of in the supporting material. Kurson names the divers who died and does not organise his book around them; his story is a puzzle solved by two remarkable people. Chowdhury's is about what that puzzle cost and about a community that keeps producing these accidents. Read them back to back. It is the most instructive pairing on this page, and the least comfortable.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved Robert Kurson

If you want the closest match, read Jon Krakauer.

Into Thin Air. Eight deaths on Everest, and a reporter who names the reasons.

If you want the same water, read Sebastian Junger.

The Perfect Storm. A boat lost with all hands, rebuilt from weather and radio traffic.

If you loved Rocket Men, read Andrew Chaikin.

A Man on the Moon. The whole Apollo programme, from twenty-three of the astronauts.

If you want the predecessor, read Gary Kinder.

Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. A wreck a mile and a half down, and the man who found it.

If you want the argument against it, read Bernie Chowdhury.

The Last Dive. The same U-boat, with a father and son who did not come up.

If you want more non-fiction of this kind

My shelf has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Robert Kurson

Who should I read if I love Robert Kurson?

Jon Krakauer is the closest, and Shadow Divers was explicitly marketed against him and Sebastian Junger. For the historical expedition, Hampton Sides; for obsession at book length, David Grann and Susan Orlean; for the true story built entirely from documents, Laura Hillenbrand. Gary Kinder wrote the direct predecessor about a deep-water treasure hunt, Mensun Bound writes wreck identification from inside the water, and Andrew Chaikin is where to go after Rocket Men. Bernie Chowdhury's The Last Dive is the same wreck and the same community with the fatalities at the centre.

Which Robert Kurson book should I start with?

Shadow Divers (2004), which is the one people press on each other and the reason he has a readership: a U-boat where no U-boat should be, two weekend divers, and six years of dives and archive work to identify it. Rocket Men (2018) if you would rather have Apollo 8, written with the cooperation of all three astronauts. Crashing Through (2007) is the quietest and most unusual, about a man who regained his sight after decades of blindness and had to learn to interpret what he saw.

Is Robert Kurson writing a new book?

Nothing has been announced as of September 2026. He has published four books — 2004, 2007, 2015 and 2018 — and lives in Chicago. Gaps of several years are normal for him, since each book has depended on long access to a small number of people, but there is no title, publisher or date in circulation.

Is Shadow Divers a true story?

Yes. The wreck was found in September 1991 about sixty miles off New Jersey at roughly 230 feet, and John Chatterton and Richie Kohler spent about six years identifying it, eventually establishing it as U-869, using a spare parts box and a knife recovered from the wreck along with German archive records that had listed the boat as lost elsewhere. Three divers died over the course of the identification. Kurson interviewed the participants extensively, and the book is reported rather than reconstructed.

What else has been written about the same U-boat?

Bernie Chowdhury's The Last Dive (2000) covers the same wreck and the same diving community four years before Kurson's book, focusing on Chris and Chrissy Rouse, the father and son who died there in 1992. Chowdhury is a technical diver who knew them. Reading the two together gives you a much fuller and considerably darker picture of deep-wreck diving than either does alone, and it is the pairing most worth making if the subject grips you.

What did Robert Kurson do before writing books?

Law, then journalism. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1990 and practised real estate law before moving to the Chicago Sun-Times, where he started as a sports agate clerk and worked up to features. He then wrote for Chicago magazine and Esquire, where he was a contributing editor for years. His first magazine piece, in 2000, was a National Magazine Award finalist, and a later Esquire profile won the award and grew into Crashing Through.

Is Shadow Divers being made into a film?

It has been optioned and discussed for two decades without a film appearing, which is common for non-fiction with expensive underwater sequences. Nothing is confirmed or in production as of September 2026. If you want the wreck on screen in the meantime, documentary coverage of U-869 exists, and the Endurance search that Mensun Bound writes about was filmed extensively.

What order should I read his books in?

Any order — the four are unconnected. By subject: the two ocean books are Shadow Divers (2004) and Pirate Hunters (2015), which follows the search for a seventeenth-century pirate ship in the Caribbean; Crashing Through (2007) is a single life; Rocket Men (2018) is Apollo 8. Most readers start with Shadow Divers, and if they want more of the same, Pirate Hunters is the closest match in his own work.

Sources

List last reviewed 9 September 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“I've always written stories about people I could sit down with.”

— Robert Kurson, interview with collectSPACE, 2018.

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