Rating: 
Summary: Excellent story, sorely lacking in photos of the recovery
Review: The book does an excellent job of telling both the story of the sinking of the Central America and the salvage operations to recover the gold. Both sides of the story are well written and interesting. However, it is amazing that an expedition which took "1000s of magazine quality photographs" fails to include any in this 500 page tome. The reader wants to see the stacks of gold coins and pile of gold bars. Except for this glaring oversight it is a good read.
Rating:
Summary: Great Read!
Review: If a well-told adventure, drama, suspense, ingenuity, failure and success story spanning a century and a half interests you, you'll find this book rewarding. We're talking about the luck and hard work of finding gold, an intensely presented disaster at sea, the triumph of ingenuity and rational deduction and the beneficence of great good luck. Add in trickery and deceit, rejection and acceptance, trial and error, bravery and cowardice, hard work unrewarded then rewarded and you have a splendid book which will keep you up all night. Unlike our friend from California, I found the transitions from past to present and back to be particularly effective in shaping the tale. Read this book. You'll be glad you did.
Rating: 
Summary: poor-average
Review: Very detailed, but a very unsatisfying ending. Greg Kinder spends 486 pages detailing the sinking and recovery of the gold, then wraps it up with a 15 page epilog which doesn't tell what the principle characters are doing now, what is happening to the gold, or the outcome of some of the lawsuits mentioned in the book. Also, if you are looking for photos of some of the spectacular things Kinder descripes, forget it. A book this detailed should have had pages of photos, but all that are given are a few postage stamp sized ones on the back jacket cover.
Rating:
Summary: Forget the Titanic--This is the shipwreck to read about!
Review: Ship of Gold is the best non-fiction adventure tale I have read since Krakauer's Into the Wild. The history of the sinking of the Central America is meticulously detailed and compellingly written. More intriguing, however, is the story of Tommy Thompson, the wacky wonderboy who makes it his life goal to create technology that can work in the deepest parts of the sea. His story is a testament of the triumph of divergent thinking, and we are presented with a character that refuses to follow old paradigms and procedures. In the end, that's what makes him a success. What a great summer read!
Rating:
Summary: Solid Gold
Review: Undersea adventure, good old American 'know how' and undaunted spirit are three things that come to mind when trying to explain what this book is about. I have read quite a few books on undersea treasure hunting and often found the stories to be filled with excentric swashbuckling modern day pirates in search of gold based upon shear luck and happenstance. Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, much to it's credit is a well constructed re-telling of the 1857 tragic sinking of a passenger sidewheeler and the modern day efforts of a dedicated team of scientists, engineers and researchers to categorically succeed in deep water exploration and retrieval on a wreck 8000 feet below sea level. The author is to be especially commended for his solid and compassionate portrayal of the entire cast of characters from the original captain, crew and passengers through the modern day entrepreneurs who worked through numerous adversities to achieve success where few if any experts thought such efforts could succeed. Not only does the exploration succeed handsomely but so too does this book in bringing the reader into a suspensefully well told tale. I recommend this book to readers who enjoyed The Perfect Storm. We need to see a lot more of Gary Kinder's work if this is what he's capable of doing.
Rating:
Summary: Great blend of a major historic mystery with contemporary sc
Review: The author does a wonderful job of presenting a non-fictional historic event in a fashion that beats the most fascinating fictional adventures. In addition, he integrates the past with the present science and personalities of Central American searchers. It is a great piece of work!
Rating: 
Summary: A true-life adventure spanning two points 130 years apart
Review: The focus of this book is an unusual young man, trained as an engineer, but unusually creative and idiosyncratic. This is a story of triumph. A treasure is identified, is located, rivals are dispatched, the treasure is retrieved and everyone lives happily everafter. It reads quickly. A bonus is learning a little history about the California Gold Rush, and potentially a lot about ships and the mechanics of retrieving sunken treasure at great depths (8000 feet). I say potentially because if you don't have some basic knowledge in this area it will go in one ear and out the other. But the author manages to give you the sense that he is providing a thorough rendering of the complete adventure --- the initial sinking (which he recreates vividly) and the 1980s resurrection of the vessel. The biggest omission: No photos of the main actors (there are many and they are hard to keep track of)-- of the treasure or any artifacts (thousands were retrieved)---or illustrations pertaining to the original sinking (it was written up extensively in newspapers throughout the world). Overall, a definitely worthwhile exercise. This will be a blockbuster movie starring --- Matt Damon?? --- as Harvey Thompson.
Rating: 
Summary: Poor Continuity
Review: Ship Of Gold In The Deep Blue Sea recounts the 1857 voyage of the SS Central America and its return from the California Gold Rush en route to the Carolina coast. Gary Kinder's book reads more like a novel than a piece of non-fiction. The author traces the events leading up to the voyage and then describes the ill-fated journey, the principal participants, and eventual shipwreck. Still, the excessive dialogue causes the historical events to seem superficial. Moreover, Kinder uses comparisons with the Titanic shipwreck and other superfluous data. In addition, Kinder intertwines the SS Central America disaster with the 1980s engineering expedition to inspect and recover gold and artifacts from the old submerged vessel. Kinder describes the young engineer, Tommy Thompson and the Columbus-America Discovery Group, and their efforts to unearth the buried treasure deep under the sea. As a result, the historical journey gets lost in a morass of superficial and superfluous details. Accordingly, the author ruins the book's continuity. For instance, Kinder devotes an early chapter to the SS. Central America, then a chapter about Tommy, and back to a chapter about the Central America. Poor continuity! The book might have been improved if the author had written the first half about the SS Central America and the second half about Thompson's expedition. Kinder's most interesting chapter deals with the Central America's sinking on September 12, 1857. Here, Captain Herndon talks with Thomas Badger and they decide how to bring the ship down. The author descriptively uses dialogue to illustrate the disaster at sea. For example, one exchange between Dr. Harvey and a young man went as follows: "I told him to let his chair go and share with me on my floating substance, and that we would sink or survive together." (p.134) Despite these interjections, the prose leaves the reader wanting more of the author's analysis instead of mere dialogue. END
Rating:
Summary: More than a "Night to Remember"
Review: I haven't read an adventure story this good in as long as I can remember -- and I've read 'em all. It's like a group fever dream sprung from the minds of Tom Clancy, James Cameron and Sebastian Junger. In three days I did little else than read SHIP OF GOLD and I've come away from it with a profound respect for Gary Kinder as a storyteller and awe for the bravery and singlemindedness of Tommy Thompson, it's brilliant protagonist. Nonfiction doesn't come any better than this.
Rating:
Summary: great read that wraps scentific data with entrepreneurship
Review: Great adventure and well described by author. Very exciting to read from an entrepreneur's viewpoint.
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