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Summary: best non-fiction read of last year
Review: It has a strange, almost antiquated title, but it is a wonderfully told story of the greatest treasure ever salvaged. The "nugget" of the story goes much deeper than gold. I give it 2 thumbs up. Mike Zinsley, author of "The Rapture of the Deep and other Dive Stories...."
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Summary: A Fascinating Book
Review: Highly recommended. But I would like to see more deatiles about the recovery of the Ship from technology aspects, because Tommy Thompson is an ocean engineer after all.
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Summary: Truly Excellent!
Review: This is a non-fiction book by a journalist about a ship called the Cental America, which wrecked off of Savannah in the mid-1800's. The ship carried lots o' gold from the west coast gold rush. An engineer named Tommy Thompson decides to employ modern scientfic techniques for recovering goods from a shipwreck and targets the Central America. He aggressively pursues the project, inventing new technologies, garnering investors, managing legal issues, staving off competition, etc.What makes the book so good is that it has so many great elements, any one of which would make a good story: - Tommy is a fascinating, truly unique character. - Gary Kinder writes very very well, poetically at times. - It includes the history of the gold rush and the shipwreck. - It covers a fascinating range of technological challenges and inventions for deep water recovery. - The prize is big - $1.5M in gold+ in 1860 dollars; priceless today. - It's an entrepenurial venture, complete with lots o' risk. - It involves risk to human life as well. I recently listened to the abridged audio version (I rarely listen to abridged versions but the audio does not come unabridged). I thoroughly enjoyed it and got the book to see if it added any value. I was so impressed with the extra details and the writing that I can't say enough about how good it is. I stumbled across the book after listening to "The Perfect Storm", and "The Hungry Ocean" by Linda Greenlaw - "Ship of Gold" was in the same section. Those other books pale in comparison so if you liked them, you might be thrilled by this one.
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Summary: Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea
Review: Without announcement, this book arrived in the mail with the note that, having read it, I should contact the sender for a discussion about it. The first few pages caught me, and without delay, I read all 507 pages. The history of if, the adventure of it, and the truth of it enthalled me. So well written, the author kept me reading and the end almost saddened me -- the pleasure of the reading having ended. I've given five of these to friends and family and now have Tommy Thompson's pictoral version. I highly recommend Ship of Gold for ones self or for a gift.
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Summary: The abslute best book
Review: I have never read a book I enjoyed more. I am buying 4 more copies of it for my family and friends. It is just one of the best documented, exciting and accurate books ever. Gary Kinder deserves a "yahoo's" for the job of writing this book. Thank you Gary
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Summary: Couldn't put it down
Review: I read this book for 18 hours straight. This is the coolest book on treasure hunting I've ever read. The Columbus America group's strategy for finding the Central America and the ingenious methods that they devise to retrieve the treasure make this book highly engrossing. Great for a beach read, or just any time of the year. Fantastic!
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Summary: Two Adventure Stories in One Book
Review: This well-research and generally well-written book tells two very different and equally fascinating tales, the sinking of the Steamship Central America in deep water off the Carolinas in 1857, and the efforts by Tommy Thompson to locate and salvage the vessel in 1989. Both stories are skillfully told, and for a book whose outcome is known by reading the book jacket, the suspense remains high. First, the shipwreck. Anyone who, like myself, had ever visited the U.S. Naval Academy and watched plebes hopelessly trying to climb the impressive Herndon Monument will appreciate the true story of Capt. Herndon and his gallantry aboard the Central America, as he supervised rescue efforts to incredibly save the women and children in the deep Atlantic while valiantly remaining with his ship, laden with Gold Rush loot. The other half of the story focuses on Thompson, a skilled engineer who managed to do something the United States Navy was unsuccessful doing, namely designing and building a workable, unmanned, deep sea salvage vessel. When one fully learns the difficulties presented in this task, and the monumental odds of even locating the Central America, the achievement becomes truly remarkable. The book is not without its faults however. First, even though the salvage efforts struck gold in 1989, there were no photographs at all. I would've loved to have at least gotten a glimpse of the treasures brought from the ocean floor. ( I understand Thompson has now written a "coffee table" book which might be read as a companion to Kinder's book, complete with wonderful pictures). I also disliked the awkward order of the chapters, in which, in the midst of the shipwreck when you can't put the book down late at night, the action suddenly jumps to the 1980's and Thompson's meticulous efforts at building a salvage vessel, before returning to a conclusion of the Central America drama later. I would have preferred a more chronological approach. And while I'm griping, I think I might have preferred a little less of Thompson's life story. One needn't know about his odd jobs as a teenager to appreciate his accomplishments later. All told this was a very entertaining ride, and I am looking forward to getting Thompson's book to fill in the pictoral blanks. If Amazon gave me the option I'd give it 3 and 1/2 stars.
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Summary: If you're reading reviews, then, yes, you'll like this book.
Review: I feared that this would be yet another nonfiction book that starts out like gangbusters (California! Gold! Sunken treasure!), then fades into 400 pages that should have been a magazine article. I was mistaken -- this is a terrific book that (amazingly) maintains the reader's interest all the way through. As I write this, there are >120 reader reviews for this book -- I assume that they are overwhelmingly positive (they should be, anyhow), and there's little I can add to the previous effusive commentaries. I will add the following critical comments, which (in my mind) forced a 4-star rather than a 5-star rating: (1) I found an excessive level of hero-worship here. Perhaps it was deserved, but I'd rather get there by myself, rather than have it force-fed ("he's a hero! "). (2) The really huge news in this book was the development of deep underwater techniques and tools. Yet, this is treated almost as an aside (e.g., over the next 2 months, the underwater robot (which nobody had ever built before due to technological deficiencies) was put together). This, it seems to me, was the big breakthrough, not guys poring over sonar charts. It would have been great to hear more about this story. These are minor issues. It's a fine book. Go ahead. And read it now, before they make a movie out of it.
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Summary: Ecommerce startups should read this book
Review: Are you starting a new project, business, or looking for venture capital? If you are, read this book. The main stories are exciting adventures that are sure to keep you up reading it until the middle of the night. If you are in business, the subtext of the creation and implementation of what the magazine Fast Company defines as a WOW project will keep you up all night. I bought copies of this book for my executive staff and made it required reading. Thompson's project was nothing more than a dream without backers. To get backers he had to deal with business people. How he dealt with them. The story of how he maintained his honesty, sincerity, focus, and achieved success makes this book a must read for entrepreneurs.
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Summary: I Read This Book to my Son
Review: There are many perceptive reviews preceding mine and I agree with the good things they've said. But now consider this: I read it to my 12-year old son as a bedtime story. This means I needed to have vocal characterizations of the people in the story and sometimes had to digress into explanations of some of the technical (and legal!) details. But it was an amazing, triumphant journey for my son and I. Almost nowhere else in life would a youngster get such a thorough insight into the philosophy of how we do science -- and how to be an entrepeneur. And all that "thinking about thinking" is carried along by the gripping narrative. You might think the story is too advanced for a kid but I've always found that kids rise to something like this. I believe reading him that story becomes one of the foundations of his understanding of the world. After we're done I'll probably take him to the university library and maybe to Berkeley's Sproull Hall to see one of the artifacts of the era.
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