Rig Ship for Ultra Quiet

By: P. Andrew Karam

Narrated by: Norman Dietz

Length: 13 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

There are a lot of audiobooks about submarines but not many have been written by submariners.

Join veteran submariner Andrew Karam and the crew of the USS Plunger (SSN 595) as it goes up against the best of the Soviet Navy on an extended "special operation" in the waning days of the Cold War and find out what life at sea is really like.

What makes Karam's audiobook unique is the authenticity that comes from an author who is a decorated veteran of the submarine service, coupled with the viewpoint of a fairly senior enlisted man who, with no particular ax to grind, simply calls it like he saw it.

This is an audiobook about living and working on a submarine. If you want to hear about submarine operations, tactics, and the sort of routine intelligence-gathering that every attack boat conducted every year, then this is the audiobook for you. And if you want to know what happens before and after the intelligence is gathered; what the meals are like; how submariners personalize their own minute corner of the boat; how a reactor is started up; and how to flush a submarine toilet, then this is still the audiobook for you!

©2012 P. Andrew Karam (P)2018 Tantor

this squid liked it

former Navy here. I like this book. it was honest, accurate, informative, and entertaining. if you're interested in submarines this will give you a different view than most books on the subject. that makes it very much worth reading.

Written and read for slow children, apparently.

It's hard to say which is worse, the story or the narrator. To paraphrase the publisher blurb, if you don't know the difference between a submarine and a tomato, this book is for you. The writer pretty much assumes you have no prior knowledge of anything even remotely nautical, and will need everything explained at roughly the 3rd-grade level.
But wait, it gets worse. As if the plodding, boring excuse for a story isn't bad enough, they picked a narrator who sounds like a 90-year-old on tranquilizers. I have never listened to anything else by Norman Dietz, and am now quite sure I never will. It's really hard to believe that someone approved this reading after hearing some of it. It's no wonder it takes over 13 hours to play, though the book might be less than 300 pages.
Bottom Line: If you know the difference between port and starboard, and between a submarine and an aircraft carrier, you are already a long way past the level of this book and will not want to suffer through it.