Late last year, when Gary Kinder read about some guy named James Cameron and a forthcoming movie called Titanic, he was devastated. It wasn’t just that Cameron had decided to embellish the actual story of the sinking of the Titanic by adding a romance between two star-crossed lovers, but he’d also framed his story with a tale of high-tech, modern-day treasure hunters. Cameron’s fictionalized account mirrored the true-life story Kinder had just spent the last 10 years scrupulously researching and getting down on paper. "I figured it was going to destroy everything I’d done," Kinder says.

By the time we talk in late April, Kinder seems to have accepted his agent’s assurances that the success of the movie can only add luster to Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, Kinder’s book about the 1857 wreck and recent recovery of a ship carrying gold from the California Motherlode. Kinder has even been to see Titanic with his mother and his two daughters (who have seen it twice!) and loved it. But he’s not quite ready to trust the early praise for Ship of Gold, which likens it to such riveting accounts of peril and adventure as Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm.

In Ship of Gold, Kinder interweaves two dramatic stories. The first is the story of the S.S. Central America, a sidewheel steamer that shuttled passengers and cargo between New York and Panama, taking California-bound goldseekers on the outward journey and making the nine-day journey back to New York with those who had struck it rich in the goldfields, as well as those who had struck out. Between 1853, when it was launched, and 1857 Kinder discovered, the Central America "had carried one-third of all consigned gold to pass over the Panama Route." Not to mention the untold millions in gold dust, nuggets, coins, and bars that had "traveled aboard her in the trunks and pockets and carpetbags and money belts of her passengers."

On the fateful journey from Panama to New York in September 1857, the Central America carried its full complement of 500 passengers. Among them were newlyweds Ansel and Adeline "Addie" Easton (sister of one of the richest men in California); Judge Alonzo Monson, who was legendary for his gambling losses in the gold fields; and a disappointed young goldseeker named Oliver Manlove, who had recorded in his diary every mile of his journey west. The ship was captained by William Lewis Herndon, a legendary sailor and explorer who several years before had written a classic of 19th-century adventure, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, about his experiences in South America.

Kinder estimates that he read hundreds of contemporary accounts, interviews, diaries, and reminiscences of Central America passengers to construct an almost moment by moment account of the ship’s encounter with a hurricane off the coast of the Carolinas; the heroic efforts of passengers and crew to keep the ship afloat (for hours and hours and hours, male passengers formed a bailing line to keep the rising water away from the steam boilers); the desperate transfer of some of the women passengers in storm-tossed waters to ships that had come to assist the foundering Central America; the heartrending separation of the Eastons; the steely last moments of Captain Herndon, who went down with his ship; and the horrible days adrift of the few others who ultimately survived. It is a wrenching and thrilling account, and any writer would be proud of the power of its telling.

But, as fascinating as it is, the story of the sinking of the Central America is not Kinder’s main story. Instead, it is the search for the wreck and the recovery of its treasure that make up the bulk of Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. And in Kinder’s hands, this story — even with all its technological and legal details about deep sea recovery efforts — is at least as riveting as his historical account of the sinking.

As Kinder tells it, after he had finished writing his previous book (a bestseller about a man who claimed to have had contact with aliens), he was looking for a project that would involve him physically. Kinder had gone to law school in Florida and learned to scuba dive there, and somehow these facts made him tegin to think about treasure hunting as a subject for his book. When he first heard about the Central America, he says, "it didn’t interest me even a little bit. I wanted something sexy. I wanted lots of jewels and gold reliquaries and the romance of the high seas in the 1600s and 1700s."

But that was before he met the team and crew of the Columbus-America Discovery Group, led by the extraordinary Tommy Thompson, whose personality dominates Ship of Gold just as it dominated the ultimately successful efforts to find the Central America and its cargo. Thompson was both the technological innovator, who could think his way through the awesome dangers and difficulties of working at great depths in the ocean, and the steely operator, who could stare down his competitors during tense encounters on the high seas and direct the Herculean efforts of a large recovery team of experts and crew members.

"The biggest problem I had in writing this book," Kinder says, "was trying to tell this story exactly as it happened without making Tommy seem too perfect. It was a very, very big problem, because everybody I talked to said Tommy was perfect. I began to wonder how to make this guy seem real."

Of course, Tommy has his defects. He exercised rigid control on the project, for example, not allowing certain crew members to even see the gold and artifacts as they were being brought to the surface. That engendered some deep anger, Kinder says.

Thompson eventually allowed Kinder unprecedented access to the project records and personnel, and Kinder has put that access to good use. His account is informative, dramatic, and even funny. It didn’t come without effort and a big dose of frustration. The book was scheduled to be published for the last three or four years, but publication had to be delayed while competitors’ lawsuits against Thompson and Columbus-America wound through the courts. Kinder used the time to rework the book. "As things turned out, it ended up being a much better manuscript," he says with characteristic grin-and-bear-it good humor.

As Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea at last arrives in bookstores all across the country this month, Gary Kinder sits in Seattle (where he runs a business teaching lawyers to write) waiting for his ship to come in.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California, and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Mike Wright rounds up and rounds out the Wild West “I sometimes find myself,” Mike Wright says over the phone from his home in Chicago, “writing for the ear instead of the eye.” After a lifetime in radio and television, Wright talks with the precise enunciation and measured tone of a professional speaker, and he writes with the voice of the teacher you wish you’d had in school knowledgeable, enthusiastic, full of wonderful stories about the real people behind the dates. This is one reason why Wright’s “What They Didn’t Teach You” series is proving so popular. Since the first one appeared only a few years ago, the books have explored the lives and times of those who lived through the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II. The latest book in the series is What They Didn’t Teach You About the Wild West. Many of the characters are familiar to us, but Wright gives them a new slant, a witty, level-headed shakedown that reveals the individual behind the persona. He focuses his searchlight on Lewis and Clark, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, and Doc Holliday. Wright documents the still often overlooked contributions of women women of all sorts, from farmers to prostitutes to mothers (sometimes, of course, one and the same). He devotes a fascinating chapter to the roles of blacks in the Old West, including the surprising tidbit that perhaps as many as 25 percent of the cowboys were of African descent. One of Wright’s most fascinating stories is a reconstruction of Santa Anna’s attack on the Alamo, and the wildly differing accounts of Davy Crockett’s death which may have been an execution following a last-minute surrender.

Mike Wright was born in 1938 and grew up in Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia. During World War II, at the tender age of five, he began a public career as a singer, performing at nearby military bases. Frequently he was dressed in an Uncle Sam suit, complete with pasted-on cotton goatee. “Regretfully,” he sighs, “I have no pictures of that. Now, of course, I’m a little older. I don’t have the Uncle Sam suit, but I still have a white goatee.” Young Mike’s singing had its career pitfalls. “It’s hard to be a boy soprano when your voice changes to a bass or baritone. I did some acting stage, a couple of very minor movies.” Wright began working in radio while enrolled at William and Mary in Virginia, where he found the classes less than entrancing. While working as a disc jockey, he began to write. In time he moved into television news, from which he finally retired in 1991. “I was a reporter, anchor, producer from small cities to large. I spent the last 17 years as a producer with NBC in Chicago.” When Wright left TV news, he wrote a documentary on Route 66 for a Chicago station. “Then I got into writing full-time, and I haven’t looked back.” Wright’s first book, What They Didn’t Teach You About the Civil War, was published in the 1996. He has been zooming along ever since. “From my days in radio and television,” he admits, “I can write pretty fast. I can sometimes churn out 20 pages a day. I get it all in mind; I get my notes; I get the books I work from and I just start writing from there. Of course, these 20 pages or sometimes it’s only two or whatever aren’t the final version.

“I write on the computer,” he adds. “At the end of the day I print everything out in hard copy, and after dinner I read it to my wife, every night. She reads she hears everything I’ve written in that one day. She says she enjoys it.” He laughs. “When I read it aloud, I get a feeling for it myself. I make corrections, she makes corrections, I rewrite. And she gets to listen to my rewrite as well.” Understandably, Wright’s wife seldom gets around to reading his finished books.

Wright attributes his writing speed to his days in television news. “I remember when Elvis Presley died. I was writing copy for NBC. This was back in the days of typewriters, and they wouldn’t let me finish a piece of paper, of copy. It was going directly from my typewriter to on the air. I would type about half a page and they would pull it out and I would finish the sentence and keep on going for another half page and they would pull it out. I kept that up for several hours.” Wright’s account of the first book’s genesis explains the appeal of the series an individual slant on history told with infectious enthusiasm. “I had done an earlier book on the Civil War, about Richmond, City Under Siege. I had done some work for a television producer on a Civil War documentary. And I had a lot of material that I had gathered over the years. I don’t throw away anything, as my wife says.

“So I started putting it together and then realized that I didn’t want to tell a story from point A to point B, from one year to the next. I wanted to tell it so that people can pick up one chapter, read it, put it down, pick up another chapter, and they aren’t really losing the train of thought.” Presidio is primarily known as a military publisher, but Wright points out that his books “aren’t really that war-based. There are other books devoted to the battles or whatever. I try to tell readers what the guy was doing at home. There was so much more going on during World War II, for instance, than just the fighting. There was a lot going on in the East when people were going out West.” Obviously Wright loves history. However, like most of us he has complaints about how it’s usually taught. “You know, in History 101 in college, we all get the same things thrown at us. We get dates, names. We may get facts, but we don’t get the why. This is what I’m more interested in: What makes people do this?” What Wright manages to do is place the so-called Wild West in the context of the history before and after it. We learn a good bit about the history of North and Central America that determined the nature of the immigrant European culture that would soon be imposed on so many areas. For example, Wright explains the role smallpox played in the Spanish overthrow of the Aztecs. He examines the ways in which inflated and outright false stories of the land of milk and honey out west drew innocent settlers who were unprepared to find life so dreary and difficult. He looks at the result of a million or so cattle wandering untended in Texas after so many farmers turned soldier during the Civil War.

Wright is telling us the stories no one bothered to mention in school, and he’s also reminding us of the characters that never make it into the TV movies. How did the Chinese happen to become the primary workers who were laying the new railroad tracks? How did the whites celebrate their attacks against Indians? What did Jesse James like to do in his spare time? Wright knows the answers. This isn’t just the history we’ve not been told. It’s history about real people living real lives lives full of pain and humor and joy and disappointment and grief, just like all our lives today.