Deep Descent: Adventure and Death Diving the Andrea Doria
by Kevin F. McMurray
    In 1956, on her maiden voyage to New York, traveling at 21 knots in thick fog, the passenger liner Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish steamship Stockholm and sunk 160 miles off the coast of New York. McMurray, a skilled diver and adventure journalist, chronicles the underwater exploration of the wreck site by amateur divers in search of souvenirs.

Down Time: Great Writers on Diving
by Ed Kitrell
    A collection of essays, poetry, and fiction on diving.

The Last Dive: A Father and Son's Fatal Descent into the Ocean's Depths
by Bernie Chowdhury
    Chowdhury chronicles the tragedy of Chris and Chrissy Rouse, an energetic father-son dive team who met with disaster while attempting to explore a German U-boat 230 feet deep in the waters off New York. Though highly competent in perilous underwater cave diving, the Rouses lacked experience on the open sea, leaving them unprepared for a cruel convergence of deadly circumstances.

Lost Subs
by Spencer Dunmore
    "From poor, primitive Hunley a Confederate sub that was "essentially an overgrown boiler" to the atomic submarine Kursk," Dunmore 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

Neutral Buoyancy: Adventures in a Liquid World
by Tim Ecott
    BBC journalist Tim Ecott recounts his ongoing adventures in the "liquid world" of scuba diving, from battling rip tides off the Dorset coast in southwest England to exploring the shark-rich waters of the Caribbean, musing along the way on the history and meaning of humanity's fascination with diving and reflecting on how his underwater experience has reshaped his life.

A Night to Remember
by Walter Lord
    Lord interviewed scores of Titanic passengers, fashioning a gripping you-are-there account of the ship's sinking that you can read in half the time it takes to see the film. The book boasts many perfect movie moments not found in Cameron's film. When the ship hits the berg, passengers see "tiny splinters of ice in the air, fine as dust, that give off myriads of bright colors whenever caught in the glow of the deck lights." Survivors saw dawn reflected off other icebergs in a rainbow of shades, depending on their angle toward the sun: pink, mauve, white, deep blue--a landscape so eerie, a little boy tells his mom, "Oh, Muddie, look at the beautiful North Pole with no Santa Claus on it."

Red Star Rogue : The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S.
by Kenneth Sewell
    Early in 1968 a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine sank in the waters off Hawaii, hundreds of miles closer to American shores than it should have been. Compelling evidence, assembled here for the first time, strongly suggests that the sub, K-129, sank while attempting to fire a nuclear missile, most likely at the naval base at Pearl Harbor.

Return to Titanic
by Robert D. Ballard
    On the night of April 14, 1912, Titanic sank in the icy North Atlantic, and 1,523 people aboard the ship drowned. About 6,000 artifacts have been removed from the vessel and the water around it since Ballard discovered the ship 13,000 feet below the surface in 1985. In May 2003 Ballard returned to document the damage done to the ship since then. "Ensuring Titanic's preservation was at the heart of the expedition," he writes. Ballard wants to give the vessel the same kind of protection "that has shielded other national and international treasures."

Submarine (Eyewitness Books)
Discover the fascinating history of submarines and submersibles, from the first workable designs of the 16th century to Cold War vessels armed with nuclear missiles. This guide, created in association with the U.S. Navy Submarine Force Museum, illustrates the technology used to build and navigate submarines and the many ways they are used today.

The Submarine : A History
by Tom Parrish
    This history of the submarine takes the subject from David Bushnell's Turtle, which carried out the first submarine combat mission in 1776, to the Russian Kursk, whose explosion in 2000 was the latest of many disasters in the accident-prone Soviet and Russian fleet.

The Terrible Hours
by Peter Maas
    May 23, 1939. Television was being advertised for the first time to American consumers. Europe was on the brink of war as Hitler and Mussolini signed an alliance in Berlin. These were the days before sonar and before the discovery of nuclear power revolutionized submarine design. Dependent on battery power, submarines were actually surface ships that "occasionally dipped beneath the waves." If a sub went down, "every man on board was doomed. It was accepted that there would be no deliverance." Swede Momsen was, according to master storyteller Peter Maas, the "greatest submariner the Navy ever had," and he was determined to beat those odds

The Secret in Building 26 : The Untold Story of America's Ultra War Against the U-boat Enigma Codes
by Jim Debrosse
    From Booklist The Ultra secret (Allied decryption of German messages during World War II) has produced a growing body of literature since it was revealed 30 years ago, indicative not only of steady interest in the topic but also of the fact that it still retains its own secrets. DeBrosse and Burke benefit from the former, and make fascinating disclosures of the latter, in their account of the machines, called "bombes," that broke the German encryption tool, Enigma.

Torpedo Junction: U-Boat War Off America's East Coast 1942
by Homer Hickam
    An account of America's early war against the U-Boat.

U-Boat Adventures: Firsthand Accounts from World War II
by Melanie Wiggins
    Twenty-two U-boat veterans tell their stories in this collection of their experiences, recorded by the author during several years of travel throughout Germany. While many books have been written about the U-boat war, this is one of the few that focuses on the lives of the submariners, and rarer still is its concentration on the crewmen rather than the officers. Melanie Wiggins interviewed seventeen men of the enlisted ranks, along with five commanders, to take readers into the terrifying world of underwater warfare, where every single crewman made a crucial difference in the fate of his boat.

The Sea Hunters : True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks
by Clive Cussler
   Drawing upon research and his own dramatic interpretations, Cussler describes 12 deep-sea wrecks, one of which is actually a steam locomotive. He introduces each incident through a fictionalized account of the tragedy and a map that shows the general geography under discussion. The author then describes the various attempts he and his companions made before actually locating that specific site. Often filled with humorous remarks and barbed comments, this firsthand narrative of the physical and mental challenges they faced also provides insight into the human and bureaucratic factors involved in such explorations.

K-19 THE WIDOWMAKER : The Secret Story of The Soviet Nuclear Submarine
by Peter Capt Ret Huchthausen
    This book recaps the near-meltdown of a nuclear reactor in 1961 aboard the first Soviet ballistic missile boat, the K-19. The captain, Nikolai Zateyev, wrote a memoir of his career, which is extensively excerpted here and gives a glimpse into the Soviet nuclear navy and the shoddily constructed ships that Zateyev was given to command; a defective seal nearly sank the K-19 on a shakedown cruise.

Shipwreck (Eyewitness Books)
    Discover the mysterious world of shipwrecks and undersea treasure — how they are recovered and preserved. Here is a spectacular and informative guide to some of the world's most significant shipwrecks. Superb full-color photographs of submerged wrecks and their lost cargoes and treasures offer a unique "eyewitness" view of ships and the lives of those who sailed in them.

Descent : The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss
by Brad Matsen
    A legendary naturalist and a wealthy engineering student come together in the name of science (and glory) in this look at the discoveries that made William Beebe and Otis Barton international celebrities of the Depression era. Journalist and nature-doc producer Matsen shows how Barton, who'd long dreamed of undersea adventure, convinced the already-famous Beebe that his diving device will be the key to Beebe's success. Barton would pay for the bathysphere—a four-and-a-half-foot steel ball dangling from a wire rope and ventilated by its occupants waving a palm leaf fan—and thus go along for the ride. The men were personally incompatible, but they made an effective team; from 1929 to 1934, they made more than 20 dives off Bermuda and many improvements in their vehicle.

Seizing the Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-Boats Codes, 1939-1943
by David Kahn
    Kahn, a noted historian of codebreaking, reveals how the Allies broke the main German code system in World War II. He underscores the strategic importance of submarine warfare in the Atlantic, giving a balanced account of the ultimate importance of codebreaking in that arena. High drama at sea seizing German codebooks and equipment and analytical genius ashore were essential.