Ship’s Library

By DAVID W. MUNNS
Assistant Editor

LIGHT THIS CANDLE: The Life and Times of America’s First Spaceman
by Neal Thompson, New York: Crown Publishers, March 2004. 464 pp. $27.50
ISBN: 0-609-61001-5

A well-researched biography, Light This Candle is a long overdue account of Alan Shepard, the first American to enter space. Based mostly on official records and personal reflections, the book paints a portrait of the “brashest, cockiest and most flamboyant of America’s original Mercury Seven,” and regards Shepard, the man who played golf on the moon, as the best of the best.

Neal Thompson, a veteran journalist, writes this book with knowledge gained through interviews from some of Shepard’s closest friends — John Glenn, Wally Schirra and Gordon Cooper among them — to provide insight into the zealously guarded life of perhaps the most enigmatic of American astronauts. Thompson describes Shepard as “charming, hilarious, warm, inviting, generous and even sexy,” despite his reputation as “the Icy Commander” among the NASA team earned by “his egotistical insouciance, his questionable morals, his disregard for authority and disdain for the press.”

Shepard, a Naval Academy graduate, served on a destroyer late in World War II and became a naval aviator. He flew fighters with two carrier-based squadrons and graduated from the U.S. Navy Test Pilot School. He later served as a test pilot at the Naval Air Test Center in Patuxent River, Md. With this experience, NASA recruited him as one of the original Mercury astronauts. In April 1963, he became America’s first spaceman.

The book pits Shepard against fellow astronaut John Glenn, portraying Glenn as the “golden boy” and Shepard as the rebel, as well as other astronauts on the NASA team. NASA’s decision to pick Shepard over Glenn to be the first man in space is attributed by Thompson to Shepard’s shrewd politicking and a mental and physical drive that overshadowed Glenn’s pristine reputation.

Despite being passed over for astronaut Neil Armstrong to be the first man on the moon, Shepard eventually made that journey in 1969. With nearly half a billion spectators watching, the former Navy test pilot descended his ladder onto the moon’s surface and reinforced his reputation as a historic prankster by hitting a golf ball on its surface.

Light This Candle comes at a time when space travel is once again in the news, generating renewed interest in the space program. The loss of life, the grueling training of astronauts, the cutthroat environment at NASA, and the agency’s successes and failures are some of the elements that makes this a welcome addition to the history of the nation’s space programs.

SHADOW DIVERS: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II
by Robert Kurson, New York: Random House, July 2004. 375 pp. $26.95
ISBN: 0-375-50858-9

Robert Kurson, former Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago magazine writer, offers this nonfiction adventure story on a subject replete with history and action. It is a journalistic narrative of two deep-sea wreck divers who defy popular doubt to explore and identify a sunken World War II-era German U-boat off the coast of New Jersey.

The challenge of Richie Kohler and John Chatterton, the men at the helm of the expedition, lies in their determination to discredit the popular belief that a U-boat could not possibly have been laid to rest so close to American soil without account, and a quest to quell their own obsessions. Initially at odds from previous experiences, Kohler and Chatterton make amends after their first dive together, when Chatterton comes to understand Kohler’s passion for diving.

Kohler tells Chatterton, “For a while, you and I were the only two people in the world who knew [the boat] was a U-boat.”

At that point, Kurson writes, Chatterton “understood what Kohler meant. He could tell that Kohler was not talking about diving now, he was talking about life, and he thought it would not be a bad thing to get to know this man better.”

The book, regardless of a reader’s knowledge about deep-sea diving, is a story about passions for the sea and redefining history. Kurson writes, “Deep-shipwreck diving is unusual … because it confronts man’s most primordial instincts — to breathe; to see; to flee from danger — the lay person need not strap on the equipment in order to appreciate the peril. He need only contemplate the sport’s dangers [in order] to know why most people in the world would never consider chasing fisherman’s numbers 60 miles out and 200 feet down into the middle of nowhere.”

Shadow Divers also offers a tremendous history lesson in the expedition’s attempts to specify exactly which German U-boat the men had discovered. It expounds on the methods of recovering sunken remains and identifying them. Once the boat is identified, the book addresses the impact that such remains can have in rewriting history. Ultimately, it refutes common beliefs about World War II and demystifies history that a decade ago was casually accepted as truth.

Kurson could not have picked a more exciting subject for a journalistic narrative. Shadow Divers is about the mystery of the sea, the bonds of tested friendship, death-defying risks and the tremendous value that sea adventurers offer history. It is conveyed in a dynamic narrative that brings the reader into the adventure and gives them with an alternative view of history.