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Raising the Dead |  | Author: Phillip Finch
Publisher: HarperSport
Category: eBooks
This item is no longer available
Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 70667
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Pages: 320
Publication Date: September 4, 2008
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Product Description
On New Year's Day, 2005, David Shaw travelled halfway around the world on a journey that took him to the Kalahari Desert of South Africa, to a site known locally as Boesmansgat: Bushman's Hole. His destination was nearly 900 feet below the surface. On 8 January, he stepped into the water. He wore and carried on him some of the most advanced diving equipment ever developed. Mounted to a helmet on his head was a video camera. David Shaw was about to attempt what had never been done before, and he wanted the world to see.He descended. About fifteen feet below the surface was a fissure in the dolomite bottom of the basin, barely wide enough to admit him and his equipment and the aluminum tanks slung under his shoulders. He slipped through the opening, and disappeared from sight, leaving behind the world of light and life. Then, a second diver descended through the same crack in the stone. This was Don Shirley, Shaw's friend and frequent dive partner, one of the few people in the world qualified to follow where Shaw was about to go. In the community of extreme diving, Don Shirley was a master among masters.Twenty-five minutes later, one of the men was dead. The other was in mortal peril, and would spend the next 10 hours struggling to survive, existing literally from breath to breath. What happened that day at Bushman's Hole is the stuff of nightmarish drama, juxtaposing classic elements of suspense with an extreme environment beyond most people-s comprehension. But it-s also a compelling human story of friendship, heroism, unswerving ambition and of coming to terms with loss and tragedy.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Is It As Good As Shadow Divers? October 2, 2009
medi (Southern Calif.)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
It is inevitable that comparisons will always be made between great books within the same genre. Such is the fate of Phillip Finch's "Raising The Dead". This engaging book concerning the the rarefied world of deep diving will forever be compared to the ever-popular "Shadow Divers" by Robert Kurson. In both sagas the story unfolds at unimaginable depths where even the slightest mishap/mistake can and does cascade into a fatal event.
Notwithstanding further comparisons, "Raising The Dead" is a about a diver (David Shaw) who in the span of only 5 years went from a "rank beginner(diver) to one of the most accomplished and ambitious divers" in the history of sports diving. The depths to which Shaw achieved (700 ft to 900 ft) were often record dives on a non rebreather apparatus; "more men have walked on the moon."
In June 2004, during a cave dive at Bushman's Hole Shaw descended to an astounding depth of almost 900 feet. What he inadvertently discovered was the body of a young cave diver lost to a diving mishap some 10 years earlier. Though the author makes little note of the fact that Shaw is deeply religious and that Shaw had a previous dream envisioning that he would discover this body, Shaw felt that God has guided him to the body so that he can retrieve it for the still grieving parents of the young diver. All this would be little known to the world except for the fact that the mainstream media picked up the story; a story in which the media (newspapers, magazines, radio, television and a video team) intended to document this Herculean effort to retrieve the body at the bottom of a 900 ft deep cave. This is diving at the extreme!
Unfortunately all does not go as planned and as a result, the media and the reader witnesses a tragedy in the making. Phillip Finch documents this in a manner where the reader is aware of the inescapable tragedy but can't stop reading the next page, much like witnessing a train you know is going to crash but you can't stop looking at it.
As is common with all great extreme adventure stories where human boundaries are tested, this story involves the elements of courage vs. calculated recklessness, altruistic goals vs. potentially deadly practicalities and perhaps foreseeable tragedy vs. almost averted tragedy (sadly, "what could have been").
For those of us who are scuba divers, and even those of you who are not, this is certainly a book worthy of read. Is it better than Shadow Divers? You tell me.
 just fantastic June 26, 2008
CR Panegrouw (South-Africa)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Awesome read , you just never want to put this one down , no hectic technical details in the story line , so non-tech divers can enjoy this one to without getting bored !
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