After a good first book but maybe a little too much focused on the Civil War, this second book fixes it with 14 new wreck stories to discover, from 17 century to World War II and all around the world, with not only ships but also a plane, a dirigible, a plane and even a pair of famous cannons. Obviously, there's Civil War again, but only for three chapters. Everything is put in chronological order, so we travel as time passes, jumping from battles to incidents that might sometimes have been prevented...
It's more varied and balanced than in the first book, and with a five-star gurst list : no less than Carpathia, Mary-Celeste and the future president Kennedy when he was castaway on a tiny island in the Solomon archipelago. This chapter was the less appealing to me, but, ended to be the best of the book, with the suspense of the sinking then the survival. But all are not as gripping. Some are even a bit dull (the whole life of Akron, even told by Clive Cussler, isn't very interesting...), and less immersive than in the first book, and the horror feeling we could occasionally have totally disappeared.
And that's maybe why this second book is not better than the first, just « as good » and for different reasons.
There's again a central section with photos and illustrations, plus introduction and postcript with some additional anecdotes.
Overall, this duology is a good read. If only history could be always as interesting as when Cussler and Dirgo tell it, either in the past or in real life, magnetometer in hand...