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Summary: Two Good Sea Stories Woven Into Book
Review: Author Gary Kinder is a good writer. In "Ship of Gold" he weaves two different stories into an exciting adventure book.The Central America was a two-wheeled steam ship carrying Californians and a large shipment of gold from Panama to New York in 1857. Beset by a hurricane off the coast of Georgia, she sank with a loss of 400 of her five hundred passengers. About a third of the book recounts the voyage of the ship, its growing impairment in the storm, eventual sinking and the rescue of survivors. Using many first person accounts, this sea story is as exciting as any of the recent spate of "true adventure" books that have hit the shelves in the last decade. Most of the book is given over the story of Tommy Thompson, dreamer, visionary and treasure hunter. We learn the life story of a young man who possesses an engineers ability to tinker, Franklin's persistence, inventiveness and curiosity, Rockefeller's business acumen and enough personal idiosyncrasies to drive many who have worked with him to distraction. Thompson dreams of working in deep oceans, recovering, maneuvering and exploring at depths not worked by anyone else. The work he wants to do is sunken ship recovery. The Central America is his target. Lying off of the Continental shelf, she is miles down. That depth has ensured, however, that she is unplundered, which can not be said about most wrecks laying in shallow waters that are the usual targets of treasure hunters. The problem is that the whereabouts of the Central America are unknown, and the means to find her and - if found - recover her treasure do not yet exist. Most of the story focuses on Thompson's creating everything needed to pursue his vision. He and his team research the Central America until they know it inside and out. They conceive of and invent the technological means of carrying out the search and recovering objects from the deep. They enlist sonar technology that can sweep likely swaths of the ocean in which their ship might lay. They hire experts to take the information they have and project possible locations of the ship. They identify, pursue and convince the wealthy of Columbus, Ohio to back their venture. The Tommy Thompson story is the story of an entrepreneur living the American "pluck and luck" ideal and conquering new frontiers. Actual ocean operations involve many challenges - pursuit by other treasure hunters, rough seas, technological breakdowns, false targets and frustration by financial partners looking for quick results. The story of Thompson at sea in search of the Central America is quick paced and surprisingly suspenseful given the fact that it really is the story of some guys on a modern ship with expensive technology conducting search and salvage operations. But that is the worth of the book. Kinder renders the Tommy Thompson story very well and manages to create believable suspense without being overwrought. He does an outstanding job of weaving a white-knuckle sea disaster with a modern tale of entrepreneurism into a pretty good book. My only complaint is that at times he becomes almost worshipful of Thompson and does spend a lot of time detailing his habits, history and person -- more than you usually want to know in this type of book. But it's a credit to the author's writing skill that this hagiographic element does not distract too much from a suspenseful and interesting tale.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: This is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read about Maritime disaster, and I have definately read a lot of them. It tells the story of how the SS Central America, loaded with passengers and fresh California gold, was caught in one of the nastiest hurricaines ever to strike off the Carolina coast. The men, with the Captain's encouragement, were able to keep the ship afloat long enough for all the women and children to be rescued by another ship, knowing all along how their fate would turn out. The book then switches gears to tell the tale of how a young entrepreneur named Tommy Thompson had a goal to find and salvage the treasures of the Central America, and how he planned to go about doing it. You won't want to put it down!
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Summary: Ship of Gold will keep you on the edge of your chair
Review: Ship of Gold works on three different levels. It's the tense, terrifying story of the worst sea disaster in American history, until then. And its the suspenseful, nerve-wracking story of the recovery of its treasure. Finally, its a business case history that should be studied in every business school for the valuable lessons it teaches about managing a project. Here are a few of the things it teaches: Get experience at someone else's expense. Analyze other people's mistakes. Analyze other people's successes. Become an expert. Know how to find other experts. Build a network of experts. Get information from other experts without tipping your hand. Plan carefully. Execute your plans daringly. And a dozen other vitally important lessons. Have the fun of finishing this list. Buy this book.
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Summary: For engineers and history buffs --> story includes it all!!!
Review: While I didn't say the _book_ itself includes it all (some small typos and awkward prose), the _story_ it relates is absolutely spellbinding. A friend handed me this book on a Thursday afternoon, suggesting that I read it. He knew I'm a real history buff and also a mechanical engineer. I gave it back to him Sunday morning, agreeing with him wholeheartedly that this is a story you can't get away from (I slept four hours Friday and Saturday nights just to have time to read this). The story has many interesting details to lure the reader in. If you are interested in the 49ers and western expansion - then this book has something for you. If you're interested in sailing and storms (a la "The Perfect Storm") - then, again, you're in luck. And if you love to see strong-willed nerds win the big money (a la Bill Gates vs. Michael Jordan) - then this book drives home another success story of that type. Another reviewer seemed to view Tommy Thompson as a greedy, glory-hogging, hell-bent-for-leather type who had no concern for anything but his dream and the money. I beg to differ. It appears that Mr. Thompson is a very goal-oriented person, who set a high standard for himself. And after crafting a very detailed plan to attain this dream, he plunged into this (no pun intended) with his best effort. I heartily recommend this book to anyone with a mechanical bent, a love for history, or an interest in sailing. And it also fits in with my favorite quote from one of our greatest American heroes, Theodore Roosevelt. "It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
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Summary: Not a Heart of Gold
Review: This book is primarily of interest in providing insights to the heart of a treasure hunter and salvager -- and the picture isn't very pretty. Even though author Kinder couldn't be kinder in his depiction of Thompson, he emerges from the story as a ruthless and egomaniacal looter of a historic treasure. Thompson uses his job at a university to develop his own treasure-hunting devices, then quits his job (after not performing it) to ensure that the university has no claim to the technology Thompson developed while on its payroll. Thompson nearly kills a member of his crew by waiting to recover his ROV after a storm hits his salvage vessel. Thompson, driven by paranoid fears, won't let the crew he has terrorized even see the treasure that is being recovered. This is not the portrait of an "unsung hero," as another reviewer puts it. This is the story of a man that only an investor could love. The most worthwhile service performed by this book is the contrast it offers between Thompson, practically a caricature of the ruthless treasure hunter, and legitimate underwater explorers and archaeologists such as Bob Ballard. Sadly, though, the author treats his subject with kid gloves and glosses over this contrast as systematically as he glosses over the distinction between salvage and archaeology.
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Summary: a real disappointment
Review: this book begins with a riveting account of the Central America and its demise; about a quarter of the book. The book then founders miserably in an undiscriminating tide of details and people who turn out to be UNrelated to the recovery attempt! By the time we get to the excavation of the gold, (the very last chapters) i felt as if the book had sunk to the depths of the ocean along with the Central America. i'm a very disappointed that so few books are edited carefully these days. this book holds more potential than it lived up to.
Rating: 
Summary: Ship of Gold Review
Review: The story is interesting, but the first half of the book seemed to flow better than the second half. The second half was disjointed, seemed to be written at a different time or by someone different. The ending was abrupt, inconclusive and uninteresting.
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Summary: Great book!
Review: I love this book! I'm an engineer - this was a great tale, well written (and I read a lot)! I highly recommend this!
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Summary: A Book that Rivals the Tale it Tells
Review: Gary Kinder chronicles the story of a young maverick, out-of-the-box thinking engineer in his efforts to use the recovery of a mid-nineteenth century shipwreck as a proving ground for his deep-ocean research ideas. Tommy Thompson is a tireless dreamer who never let an obstacle or the "conventional wisdom" stop him from focusing on his goal. Combined with this modern-day epic is the historical and human account of the original ship on its final voyage: who the passengers and crew were, why they were there, where they were from, where they were going, what the ship carried that made it such a significant event, and what happened in those final days and hours as the ship sank. Kinder has equaled Thompson's efforts with his diligence and attention to detail in writing this tale. He has taken the tedium of scientific research, investment capital and engineering physics and turned them into an edge-of-your-seat adventure! With every page I could not help but be in awe of the depth of research the author has put into this document. This book was given to me by my brother, who has a masters degree in English literature and who is a voracious reader. He described this as "the best book I have ever read." I have to agree. After 507 pages, I still didn't want it to end.
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Summary: A wonderful story wonderfully told
Review: This book has something for everyone. You learn something about the history of 19th century sea travel, something about modern technology, something about the financing of risk-taking entrepreneurs, something about maritime law. In addition, you get a semi-biography of Tommy Thompson, an oceanographic engineer / treasure hunter with a vision both of doing something no one else has been able to do, and of making scads of bucks at the same time. Kinder puts it all together and makes it a great story. I listened to the audio version while driving from Fresno to Las Vegas, usually an insufferably boring stretch of ugly highway. But this book captured my attention and made the drive seem half as long as usual. The story begins during the California gold rush, when the ship Central America, carrying millions of dollars worth of California gold, goes down in the Atlantic off the southeast coast of the U.S. As he does throughout the book, Kinder combines the human interest side of the story with history and seafaring lore, so almost anyone will be interested in at least part of it. Then the story flashes forward by more than a century as we follow Tommy Thompson's development as an oceanographic engineer and his dream of recovering the treasure on the Central America. Again, the story is told from multiple viewpoints: technological, personal, legal, financial. Perhaps the most interesting phase of the endeavor was the effort to locate the wreck in the first place. This was no easy matter. A large part of the process involved mathematics: geometry, probability, and matrix theory. Being a mathematician, I took particular interest in this part of the tale, but I think it will interest almost everyone else too. A bare outline of the story, however, won't do justice to this book. One hallmark of a well-written book is that the author can make you interested in topics you previously had no interest in, simply by virtue of good writing. Kinder does that to a fare-thee-well. If you enjoy stories well told, just for their own sakes, you can't help but enjoy this book.
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