Weekly Homework Assignment

Tough call this week with Mama Kat's weekly homework assignment. I don't usually read books, but as luck would have it, I actually did read one, thanks to a recommendation a friend gave me at work ... heck, he even let me borrow the book.

I guess he came up with the recommendation based on my German heritage ... we may even have been talking about Cape May (I had recently taken a trip there), and some of the "mysteries" of the town. One of the mysteries or "legends" has to do with a German U-boat (submarine) that was sunk just off the coast of Cape May in World War 2. A book about this was written a few years ago, called "Shadow Divers."

The story itself is about a some scuba divers who discovered a wreck off the coast of Cape May, and spent the better part of a decade trying to identify it. The writing of Robert Kurson is so good, it makes you feel like you're searching the wreck with these heroic divers ... even at times feeling like you're oxygen tank is running out of air.

Best of all (in my opinion), it paints these doomed submarine crewmen as humans ... not devils who were part of the Nazi regime ... something hardly ever done when writing about World War 2 (I guess that's quite understandable, based on the atrocities the Nazis inflicted on the Jews and the rest of the world). It's a surprisingly quick read, and is really hard to put down ... I read so much, so quickly, that I had dreams about scuba-diving ... and I never have had an urge to do this.