Going into this book my main concern was how much this was going to be a memoir of Dr. Lance, and how much it was actually going to deal with the outstanding questions regards the fate of "H.L. Hunley" and her crew. Turns out that it's actually a tripartite work, as while there is a fair amount of Dr. Lance in the book (mostly relating to the Ph.D. blues), but otherwise there are the parallel stories of the origins of the Confederate submarine effort (culminating in what the final crew of "H.L. Hunley" experienced on the way to their demise) and Lance's own effort to get actionable data that would allow her to complete her doctorate on time (against the hard deadline mandated by her USN-granted educational funding). Lance is a good story teller and I would gladly give her the chance to tell me another. ( )

3.5-ish.

I liked the history. As somebody who emphatically did not pursue graduate degrees, the modern stories of lab work were...not necessarily boring, but certainly didn't impart new information to me. ( )

I would like to know why the bodies of the crew of the Confederate submarine Hunley were found uniformly in attitudes of calm repose attentive to their assigned duties even though they died when an explosion ripped through their vessel. But I wasn't willing to read 278 pages of text to find out. Surely this story could be told succinctly in a general interest or Civil War magazine.

Reviews sound very interesting