Quotes from Robert Kurson

In the summer of 1949, Borman was one of a select few cadets to tour postwar Germany. For him, the biggest impression came at the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau...The trip sickened and saddened him, and it reinforced his certainty that America was a force for good in the world, a country that stepped up to help suffering people and defend freedom.

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him." Texas senator Lyndon Baines Johnson was

It was too late for he and his father to have an adventure, and NOTHING seemed to have any color anymore.

Early on December 25, Houston time, Lovell missed a step. He meant to enter Program 23 and then select Star 01. Instead, he entered Program 01 into his computer. An alarm rang out. Suddenly, Apollo 8's guidance system reset itself, losing all memory of how the ship was oriented in space. As a result of Lovell's mistake, the guidance system now believed Apollo 8 to be back on the launchpad at Cape Kennedy.

Even their downtime was epic.

more John Doe than Mike May. He played with this changing

I love nonfiction the most. It's hard to find a good nonfiction story, and that's why I'm not as prolific, I guess, as a lot of people. They're hard to find. I love the nonfiction writer Ben Macintyre. I think he's terrific at the form of telling a story in a cinematic way.

Real pirates were better than in movies, more daring and terrifying and cunning than any screenwriter could imagine. They operated during the Golden Age of Piracy, from 1650 to 1720.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that pirates did wear eye patches and have peg legs and have brightly colored beads. I never knew what the beads were for. They really were for frightening and terrifying their prey.

For my new book 'Pirate Hunters', I follow John Chatterton and John Mattera, two world-class scuba divers, who teach themselves to think and act as pirates while searching for what would be only the second pirate ship ever found and positively identified.

It's never too late in life to have a genuine adventure.

Piracy was risky business, and injuries were commonplace; a single lost limb or gouged-out eye could end a pirate's career. To encourage pirates not to hesitate in battle - and out of a sense of fairness - many pirate crews compensated wounded crewmen in predetermined amounts.

So many of the pleasures of recreational scuba diving don't exist for the deep wreck diver. It's not beautiful scenery for the most part; in fact, it's usually very dark. It's physically burdensome. These guys carry almost two hundred pounds of equipment, and should any of that equipment fail, they risk death.

I think that pirates represent every person's ability to get up and leave their current daily situation and go on an adventure, and maybe to see things and do things they've never done before or even dreamed of doing.

Pirates did not store all their treasures in treasure chests, then bury them and draw maps to them. That's a movie invention. In reality, pirates spent their money as fast as they could steal it because they knew they were living on borrowed time. They didn't want to wait around to enjoy the money.

I read almost exclusively nonfiction when I read, because even though it's harder to find a great true story, when you find one, the idea that it actually happened is immensely powerful.That's what moves me the most.

The more I learned about real pirates, the more exciting they seemed to me. They appeared to be even more dramatic than pirates of the movies or TV shows.

I'm a product of the 1970s, so I have a short attention span. You know, I grew up on cartoons and half-hour shows. So the stories that I'm interested in grab my attention very quickly, and they have to keep my attention.

John Chatterton is the kind of person who always seems to be up to some kind of incredible adventure.