10+ best Scuba Diving books
Surface intervals are made for reading, and if you’ve burned through your usual rotation of dive magazines or online articles, it’s time to grab an actual scuba diving book. The ones on this list range from meticulously reported nonfiction to a 19th-century novel that basically invented the underwater adventure genre.
Some of the below selections will make you want to book (no pun intended) a wreck trip immediately. A couple will make you double-check your gear before your next dive. Either way, these are the reads that divers actually talk about between dives.
1. Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson
If you ask ten divers to name their favorite scuba diving book, at least seven will say this one. Shadow Divers tells the true story of John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, two rival wreck divers who discover an unidentified U-boat sitting 230ft down off the coast of New Jersey. What follows is a six-year obsession that costs several divers their lives and others their marriages before they finally identify the wreck. Robert Kurson writes with the pacing of a thriller, but every word of it happened. It’s the book that got a lot of us hooked on wreck diving in the first place, for better or worse depending on how your significant other feels about the hobby.
Interested in this book? Grab a copy here and clear your weekend. You can also watch the documentary “Hitler’s Lost Sub.”
2. Pirate Hunters by Robert Kurson
Kurson came back about a decade later with another true story, and this one trades U-boats for pirate ships. Pirate Hunters follows Chatterton (yes, the same guy from Shadow Divers) teaming up with fellow diver John Mattera to hunt for the Golden Fleece, a 17th-century pirate ship captained by the notorious Joseph Bannister. They’re searching for it in Samaná Bay off of the Dominican Republic, working off centuries-old clues and a lot of magnetometer pings that lead nowhere. Kurson weaves in the history of the golden age of piracy alongside the modern search, so you get two stories for the price of one. It reads faster than most beach thrillers, which is a little funny given how much archival research went into it.
Interested in this book? Here’s where you can pick it up.
3. The Sea Hunters by Clive Cussler
While he is famous for his Dirk Pitt novels, Clive Cussler also spent decades running actual shipwreck searches through his real-life outfit, NUMA. The Sea Hunters collects a dozen of those true expeditions, covering everything from a Civil War submarine to a German U-boat that sank an American troop transport on Christmas Eve. Cussler writes nonfiction with the same momentum he brings to his fictional work, so even readers who don’t dive tend to plow through it in a weekend. It also helped launch his second nonfiction title, The Sea Hunters II, for anyone who finishes this one and wants more. If you’ve ever wondered what it actually takes to find a 150-year-old wreck with almost no modern technology, this is your answer.
Interested in this book? You can find it right here.
4. The Silent World by Jacques Cousteau
You can’t put together a list of scuba diving books without including the guy who more or less invented recreational scuba diving. Jacques Cousteau co-wrote The Silent World with fellow diver Frédéric Dumas back in 1953, chronicling the earliest days of testing the Aqua-Lung and exploring waters that literally no human had ever seen up close. It reads like a memoir crossed with a field report, part science and part swashbuckling adventure. Some of the practices described have not aged particularly well by modern conservation standards, and it’s worth reading with that context in mind. Still, as a snapshot of the exact moment humans figured out how to breathe underwater for fun, nothing else comes close.
Interested in this book? It’s available here. For movie lovers there is the 1956 documentary of the same name.
5. Neutral Buoyancy by Tim Ecott
Tim Ecott is a BBC journalist and certified dive master, and Neutral Buoyancy is his tour through both the history of diving and his own dives around the world, from sponge divers in ancient Greece to modern deep-diving pioneers. He jumps between historical anecdotes and personal stories from places like the Seychelles and Sardinia, and the mix keeps it from ever feeling like a textbook. What sets this one apart from a lot of diving memoirs is how much attention Ecott pays to why people are drawn underwater in the first place, not just what they found once they got there. It’s a slower read than the true-crime-adjacent pace of Shadow Divers, but it rewards patience.
Interested in this book? Order your copy here.
6. The Last Dive by Bernie Chowdhury
This one hits differently than the others on this list, partly because author Bernie Chowdhury was personal friends with the divers he’s writing about. The Last Dive tells the story of Chris and “Chrissy” Rouse, a father-son technical diving team who died exploring the same unidentified U-boat featured in Shadow Divers, just a couple of years before Chatterton and Kohler solved the mystery. Chowdhury doesn’t sensationalize the tragedy. Instead he walks through exactly what went wrong, the decompression sickness, the narcosis, the split-second decisions that didn’t go their way, so other divers can learn from it. It’s a heavier read than the rest of this list, and it should probably be required reading before anyone attempts deep wreck penetration.
Interested in this book? You can buy it right here.
7. Deep Descent by Kevin F. McMurray
The Andrea Doria has earned the nickname “the Mount Everest of scuba diving,” and Deep Descent explains exactly why. Kevin McMurray, a diver and journalist himself, chronicles decades of expert divers pushing themselves to explore the sunken Italian liner, which rests around 235ft down off the coast of Nantucket, well past recreational depth limits. A dozen divers have died attempting it, and McMurray interviews the survivors and the families left behind to reconstruct what happened on each fatal dive. The book is part history of the 1956 sinking and part cautionary tale about what happens when technical diving egos outpace training. If you dive wrecks, or just like reading about people who do, this one belongs on your shelf next to The Last Dive.
Interested in this book? Find it here.
An honorable mention is Dark Descent, also by Kevin McMurray. This book is about the sinking of and diving on the Empress of Ireland, an ocean liner that sank in 1914 in the St. Lawrence River taking over 1,000 lives with her. Another great read that is informative and will have you on the edge of your chair. It can be found here.
8. Into the Planet by Jill Heinerth
Cave diving is its own beast entirely, and few people are better qualified to write about it than Jill Heinerth, widely regarded as one of the most accomplished cave divers alive. Into the Planet opens with her nearly dying while diving inside an Antarctic iceberg, and from there it spirals back through her career: leaving a design career in Toronto to become a dive instructor, discovering flooded Mayan ruins, and recovering the body of a friend from a cave system. Heinerth is candid about the sexism she faced breaking into a male-dominated field, which gives the book more depth than a straightforward adventure memoir. NPR called it an honest, immersive look at a sport most people never think about, and that’s about right.
Interested in this book? Snag your copy here.
9. Diving into Darkness by Phillip Finch
Continuing with cave diving, this is one of the more intense entries on this list, and it comes with a fair warning: it’s not an easy read. Diving into Darkness tells the true story of Dave Shaw, a diver who located a body 900ft down in a South African cave called Boesmansgat, then went back to recover it, a decision that cost him his life. His dive partner, Don Shirley, survived a ten-hour decompression while wondering whether he’d run out of gas before reaching the surface. Author Phillip Finch is a cave diver himself, and it shows in how carefully he explains the technical side of extreme depth diving without losing the emotional weight of the story. It’s been compared more than once to Into Thin Air, and that comparison holds up.
Interested in this book? Get it here.
10. Diver Down by Michael R. Ange
In Diver Down, Michael Ange, a longtime dive instructor and technical editor for Scuba Diving magazine, walks through real accident reports from recreational and technical dives gone wrong. He then breaks down exactly what the diver should have done differently. It covers everything from lost buoyancy control to cave and wreck penetration mistakes, and it’s genuinely useful even if you never plan to dive anything more advanced than a reef. While this book is less romantic than the other titles here, its information might just save your life if you’re a diver.
Interested in this book? Pick it up here.
11. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
We’re closing this list out with a bit of a cheat, since Jules Verne wrote this one in 1870, decades before anything resembling modern scuba gear existed. Still, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea basically dreamed up self-contained underwater breathing apparatus before anyone had built one, and Captain Nemo’s crew wandering coral gardens in diving suits reads eerily close to a modern dive briefing. It’s fiction, sure, but it planted the idea of underwater exploration in the public imagination long before Cousteau made it a reality. If you want to see where the whole obsession with breathing underwater actually started on paper, this is it. Since the copyright expired ages ago, you can read it for free.
Interested in this book? Grab the free edition here or track down a print copy for your shelf here.
Honorable Mentions
Some other great reads that include scuba diving are as follows:
- Mystery of the last Olympian
- Descent into Darkness: Pearl Harbor 1941: A Navy Diver’s Memoir
- Expedition Whydah
- The search for the Atocha
- The Sunken Gold: A Story of World War I Espionage and the Greatest Treasure Salvage in History
- Treasure Hunter: Diving for Gold on North America’s Death Coast
- The Heroic Age of Diving: America’s Underwater Pioneers and the Great Wrecks of Lake Erie
- Where Divers Dare: The Hunt for the Last U-Boat
- The Deep (This is also a Jay’s Fave movie. read all about that here)
Some good books on where to go diving include:
- 100 Dives of a Lifetime: The World’s Ultimate Underwater Destinations
- National Geographic A Diver’s Guide to the World: Remarkable Dive Travel Destinations Above and Beneath the Surface
- Dive Atlas of the World: An Illustrated Reference to the Best Sites
- Fifty Places to Dive Before You Die: Diving Experts Share the World’s Greatest Destinations
Whether you choose a book on this list or find another one, a good read is always a great choice to fill the time between your diving…regardless if that time is an hour or a month or a year (but hopefully not a year!) Happy reading…and diving!
More Of Jay’s Faves
Check out the below, if interested in more of Jay’s Faves.
- The Deep
- Stahlsac Curacao Clipper Dive Gear Travel Bag
- Henderson Talon Wetsuit
- Sleepy Hollow
- Sharkskin Titanium 2 Dive Skin
- Scubapro Go Sport Fins
- Sherwood Brut Regulator
“How boring would the world be if everywhere and everyone were the same. Safe travels and good adventures.” Scuba Jay
