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Robert Kurson on Rocket Men
Kurson discusses the Apollo 8 mission and the reporting behind Rocket Men at A Novel Idea 2019.
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Adventure · HistoryOn my shelf
Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II
Kurson’s debut follows two American wreck divers, John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, who discover an unidentified German U-boat sixty miles off the New Jersey coast in 1991 and spend years — at extraordinary personal risk, losing colleagues along the way — determining exactly which U-boat it was and how it ended up there, a mystery that official naval records couldn’t explain.
Shadow Divers made Kurson’s name and set the template he’s followed since: obsessive people pursuing a mystery most others would consider unsolvable, told with the pacing of a thriller but grounded in exhaustive research. It’s widely considered one of the best adventure-nonfiction books of the 2000s.
Biography · Science
Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure, and the Man Who Dared to See
The story of Mike May, blinded at age three, who built a successful career as a CIA analyst, entrepreneur, and world-record-setting blind speed skier before undergoing an experimental stem-cell transplant in his forties that partially restored his vision — forcing him to relearn how to see as an adult, which turned out to be far harder than anyone expected.
Grown out of Kurson’s National Magazine Award-winning Esquire profile, Crashing Through is his most psychologically interesting book: the science of vision restoration turns out to be the easy part, and the real story is how disorienting and unwelcome sight becomes for someone who built an entire successful identity around not having it.
Adventure · History
Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship
Chatterton, the diver from Shadow Divers, returns alongside John Mattera to hunt for the Golden Fleece, the ship of 17th-century pirate captain Joseph Bannister, who stole it from its owners and was later sunk by two Royal Navy frigates. The pair spend years combing archives and diving unmarked wrecks off the Dominican Republic to identify a ship nobody had ever definitively located.
A direct continuation of the obsessive-search formula that made Shadow Divers work, transplanted from a WWII wreck to a genuine pirate ship. Kurson is candid about how much harder identification is with 300-year-old wrecks and spotty historical records, which makes the eventual resolution more satisfying rather than less.
Space · History
Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon
The story of Apollo 8, the 1968 mission that sent Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders around the Moon for the first time — a mission decided on with only months of preparation, in the same year as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, urban riots, and a war that seemed to be tearing the country apart. Kurson conducted extensive interviews with all three astronauts and two of their wives.
Rocket Men debuted on the New York Times bestseller list and shows Kurson applying his obsessive-research method to people who were still alive to interview directly. The book’s real achievement is context: it makes the case that Apollo 8 mattered as much for what 1968 needed emotionally as for what it proved technically.
Frequently asked questions about Robert Kurson’s books
From the bookshelf
“When things are easy a person doesn't really learn about himself. It's what a person does at the moment of his greatest struggle that shows him who he really is.”
— Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers
For more true stories of people who refused to accept a mystery was unsolvable, browse the full shelf.
