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Robert Kurson

Born: in Chicago, Illinois
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: Kurson grew up in the Chicago suburbs and still resides there today.

Biography: Robert Kurson is best known for his 2004 bestselling book, ''Shadow Divers'', the true story of two Americans who discover a World War II German U-boat sunk 60 miles off the coast of New Jersey. Kurson earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, then a law degree from Harvard Law School. He began his career as an attorney practicing real estate law. Kurson's professional writing career began at the Chicago ''Sun-Times'', where he started as a sports agate clerk and soon gained a full-time features writing job. In 2000, Esquire published 'My Favorite Teacher,' his first magazine story, which became a finalist for a National Magazine Award. He moved from the ''Sun-Times'' to ''Chicago'' magazine, then to ''Esquire'', where he won a National Magazine Award and was a contributing editor for years. His stories have appeared in ''Rolling Stone'', ''The New York Times Magazine'', and other publications.


Awards:

Primary Literary Genre(s): Non-Fiction

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/robert.kurson
Twitter: https://twitter.com/robertkurson
Website: http://www.robertkurson.com


Selected Titles

Crashing through :
ISBN: 0812973682 OCLC: 229432638

Random House, New York : 2008.

Writer Kurson tells the true story of one man's heroic odyssey from blindness into sight. Blinded at age three, Mike May defied expectations by breaking world records in downhill speed skiing, joining the CIA, and becoming a successful inventor, entrepreneur, and family man. He had never yearned for vision. Then, in 1999, a chance encounter: a revolutionary stem cell transplant surgery could restore May's vision. He began to contemplate an astonishing new world. Would music still sound the same? Would sex be different? Would he still be Mike May? The procedure was filled with risks. Even if it worked, fewer than twenty cases were known worldwide in which a person gained vision after a lifetime of blindness, and each of them suffered desperate consequences. There were countless reasons for May to pass. He could think of only a single reason to go forward: he knew it would change his life.

Pirate hunters :
ISBN: 1400063361 OCLC: 903436238

"'Pirate Hunters' is a gripping account of two courageous divers' quest to uncover the shipwrecked vessel of Joseph Bannister, one of history's most infamous pirates"--

Rocket men :
ISBN: 0812988701 OCLC: 974796189

Shares the inside story of the dangerous Apollo 8 mission, focusing on the lives of astronaut heroes Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, while illuminating the political factors that prompted the decision to risk lives to save the Apollo program and define the space race.

Shadow divers :
ISBN: 0375508589 OCLC: 52902501

Random House, New York : ©2004.

Into thin air and Sebastian Junger's The perfect storm comes a true tale of riveting adventure in which two weekend scuba divers risk everything to solve a great historical mysteryand make history themselves. For John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, deep wreck diving was more than a sport. Testing themselves against treacherous currents, braving depths that induced hallucinatory effects, navigating through wreckage as perilous as a minefield, they pushed themselves to their limits and beyond, brushing against death more than once in the rusting hulks of sunken ships. But in the fall of 1991, not even these courageous divers were prepared for what they found 230 feet below the surface, in the frigid Atlantic waters sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey: a World War II German U-boat, its ruined interior a macabre wasteland of twisted metal, tangled wires, and human bonesall buried under decades of accumulated sediment. No identifying marks were visible on the submarine or the few artifacts brought to the surface. No historian, expert, or government had a clue as to which U-boat the men had found. In fact, the official records all agreed that there simply could not be a sunken U-boat and crew at that location. Over the next six years, an elite team of divers embarked on a quest to solve the mystery. Some of them would not live to see its end. Chatterton and Kohler, at first bitter rivals, would be drawn into a friendship that deepened to an almost mystical sense of brotherhood with each other and with the drowned U-boat sailorsformer enemies of their country. As the mens marriages frayed under the pressure of a shared obsession, their dives grew more daring, and each realized that he was hunting more than the identities of a lost U-boat and its nameless crew. Author Robert Kursons account of this quest is at once thrilling and emotionally complex, and it is written with a vivid sense of what divers actually experience when they meet the dangers of the oceans underworld. The story of Shadow Divers often seems too amazing to be true, but it all happened, two hundred thirty feet down, in the deep blue sea.

The official Three Stooges cookbook /
ISBN: 0809229293 OCLC: 39181924

Contemporary Books, Lincolnwood, Ill. : ©1999.

The official Three Stooges encyclopedia :
ISBN: 0809229307 OCLC: 37992935

Contemporary Books, Lincolnwood, Ill. : ©1998.

 

 

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