Thursday, 10 January 2008

Book: The Last Dive

As I've mentioned earlier we recently came into possession of a book The Last Dive by Bernie Chowdhury. I, of course, read the book almost instantly as I thought it would be at least as good as Robert Kurson's Shadow Divers (both books touch the same topic). Unfortunately I was disappointed. You see, in Poland these books where published by two different publishers - a small one and a big one, The Last Dive by the former. It seems that the publisher did not have enough resources to get things done right. The translation is pathetic and so is the copy editing. Apart from the technical issues the book itself is badly written and chaotic. Nevertheless there's lot of interesting information contained in it.

The Last Dive is a history of a father's and son's (Chris and Chris Jr. Rouse) diving careers, from their first diving lessons to the tragic end. If you treat the book as a collection of anecdotes it might be readable. I wanted to read it because I've read Shadow Divers which was a very good book and wanted to see that story from another point of view.

The book is full of information on diving in the late 80s and early 90s especially about cave and wreck diving. It's also a great overview of the beginning of technical diving. The stories that constitute the book are, when treated separately, also quite interesting.

I would recommend this book, as you probably won't have problems with the translation :)

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