Trea­sures, Ship­wrecks, & The Dawn of Red Sea Div­ing is a mem­oir by Howard Rosen­stein, a pio­neer of Red Sea div­ing tourism. In a series of casu­al rec­ol­lec­tions, inter­mixed with pho­tographs from his per­son­al col­lec­tion, Rosen­stein shares his jour­ney from a first-time, col­lege-aged vis­i­tor to Israel to the suc­cess­ful oper­a­tor of a world-rec­og­nized scu­ba-div­ing school in one of the most beau­ti­ful under­wa­ter loca­tions on Earth.

In the intro­duc­tion and first chap­ter of his book, Rosen­stein describes how he got his start in div­ing. In 1966, after a year of com­mu­ni­ty col­lege, the author board­ed an Israeli car­go ship bound for Haifa, hitch­hiked to Eilat, and put his head under­wa­ter in the Red Sea. He was hooked. He returned in 1968 to study arche­ol­o­gy in a study abroad pro­gram at Tel Aviv Uni­ver­si­ty. Camp­ing in Cae­sarea with friends, the author took a dive into the Mediter­ranean Sea and returned to shore with a hand­ful of ancient Roman coins worth tens of thou­sands of dol­lars. This Roman ​“ATM,” as the author called it, would fund his entre­pre­neur­ial lifestyle. In 1970, at twen­ty-three years old, Rosen­stein opened the sec­ond div­ing school in Israel. 

The chap­ters that fol­low high­light Rosenstein’s div­ing adven­tures through the 1970s and ear­ly 1980s. Over the course of near­ly three decades, Rosenstein’s div­ing would intro­duce him to jour­nal­ists, sci­en­tists, polit­i­cal fig­ures, and celebri­ties includ­ing under­wa­ter pho­tog­ra­ph­er and con­ser­va­tion­ist David Doubilet; ichthy­ol­o­gist Euge­nie Clark, who pio­neered the study of sharks; and con­duc­tor Leonard Bern­stein. With the rapid expan­sion of his div­ing school from the Mediter­ranean to the Sinai Penin­su­la, Rosen­stein would also find him­self in the mid­dle of the con­flict between Egypt and Israel both in 1973, when Egypt sought to retake the Sinai, and in 1979, when peace was established. 

In a chap­ter enti­tled ​“Birth of Div­ing Diplo­ma­cy,” Rosen­stein writes about his efforts to pro­tect both his busi­ness and the mag­nif­i­cent coral reefs of Ras Mohammed, which might have suf­fered in the three-year with­draw­al of Israeli troops from the Sinai Penin­su­la fol­low­ing the Camp David Accords. This chap­ter high­lights the per­son­al chal­lenges that Israeli cit­i­zens faced from the peace treaty. In one vignette, the author tells of a scuf­fle between his son and the son of the fifth Pres­i­dent of Israel, who had come with his fam­i­ly to the Sinai to bet­ter under­stand the won­ders of the Red Sea and the impli­ca­tions of Israeli withdrawal.

Despite the chal­lenges the author faced in build­ing a busi­ness from scratch in the desert, Rosenstein’s mem­oir is an upbeat tale of suc­cess with sur­pris­ing twists along the way. Trea­sures, Ship­wrecks, & The Dawn of Red Sea Div­ing will enlight­en and enter­tain div­ing afi­ciona­dos, con­ser­va­tion­ists, and read­ers of Israeli history.