Dragon Sea

October 23, 2006
This intense look at the fierce competition in what first-time author Pope slyly calls "the extraordinary underworld of shipwrecks" focuses on the effort in the late 1990s to recover a hoard of precious 15th-century porcelain from the sunken Hoi An
ship in the Dragon Sea, a stretch of "typhoon-torn" water off the coast of Vietnam. Pope is equally adept at illuminating "the peculiarly powerful allure of shipwrecks" that drives the Hoi An
team as he is in explaining the larger and more difficult context of modern excavation efforts, where "maritime archeologists who were regularly leading excavations around the world could be counted on the fingers of one hand, but the number of looters, souvenir-seekers, and well-equipped treasure-hunters was in the high hundreds." But Pope's strength in detailing the Hoi An
story comes from his fascinating in-depth portraits of the main players in what became an unprecedented and expensive recovery effort: Ong Soo Hin, a Malaysian businessman who helped launch the project; Mensun Bound, the director of Oxford's Maritime Archaeological unit; and Dilip Tan, the operations manager under "nightmarish pressure" to finish the project. Pope expertly shows how the same ocean that can terrify and enrich can also "lay bare the very nature of man."

January 1, 2007
The wreck of the Hoi An lay on the bottom of the Dragon Sea off the coast of present-day Vietnam for centuries, containing within it a hoard of 15th-century porcelain. In the late '90s, Pope managed a salvage mission, led by Oxford archeologist Mensun Bound, which would result in the rescue of a fortune in ancient Vietnamese ceramics. Bound's moniker, "Indiana Jones of the Deep," sums up this audiobook's appeal pretty well. This is a can't miss for fans of that intrepid archeologist and/or aquatic exploration. Audie Award-winner Heller's pleasant alto voice is engaging throughout, and he does a fine job dramatizing scenes and adding accents to dialogue. The book's structure, however, is not particularly well-suited to the audio format. The narrative's chronology jumps around as Pope introduces the listener to the major players in the project with a lot of background information, making it a bit hard to follow at times. Heller is in top form with this performance, and first-time author Pope will leave readers looking forward to accounts of new adventures. Simultaneous release with the Harcourt hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 23).