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How do you describe something you’ve never experienced? Well, of course you can make things up. But there’s always some “expert” out there willing to explain how you’ve gotten the details all wrong (even those details of societies that died thousands of years before our hypothetical critic was born). So authors sometimes do hands-on research for the sake of veracity. Sometimes for curiosity. Sometimes because they want to live the story. Robert Kurson, author of Shadow Divers had various reasons for approaching his research the way he did. His fans will be relieved that nobody would allow him to dive into deep, freezing oceans (especially since he can’t swim), and they’ll laugh at his account (that of a true fiction writer) of his boat trip to the site of a sunken German U-boat.

• Chicago journalist raises a literary treasure