Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate

by Rose George

Eye-opening and compelling, the overlooked world of freight shipping, revealed as the foundation of our civilization

On ship-tracking websites, the waters are black with dots. Each dot is a ship; each ship is laden with boxes; each box is laden with goods. In postindustrial economies, we no longer produce but buy. We buy, so we must ship. Without shipping there would be no clothes, food, paper, or fuel. Without all those dots, the world would not work.

Freight shipping has been no less revolutionary than the printing press or the Internet, yet it is all but invisible. Away from public scrutiny, shipping revels in suspect practices, dubious operators, and a shady system of "flags of convenience." Infesting our waters, poisoning our air, and a prime culprit of acoustic pollution, shipping is environmentally indefensible. And then there are the pirates.

Rose George, acclaimed chronicler of what we would rather ignore, sails from Rotterdam to Suez to Singapore on ships the length of football fields and the height of Niagara Falls; she patrols the Indian Ocean with an anti-piracy task force; she joins seafaring chaplains, and investigates the harm that ships inflict on endangered whales.

Sharply informative and entertaining, Ninety Percent of Everything reveals the workings and perils of an unseen world that holds the key to our economy, our environment, and our very civilization.

Genres: Nonfiction, Business, Economics, History, Travel, Science, Maritime

304 pages, Hardcover

First published August 6, 2013

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting enough book about the shipping part of our capitalist world. But from the perspective of a yacht on the ocean, container ships are considerably less than amazing and somewhat frightening. They often are on autopilot and no one is on watch or monitoring the radio - they have such skeleton crews, maybe only 6 people. They sometimes run a black ship which means no navigation lights, so you can't see their hulks on a cloudy, moonless night even though you can hear their engines from quite a long way off. The crew have no idea they are bearing down on a small sailing yacht and would not even know if they sank one. I believe this is the fate of many yachts lost at sea.

I sailed the Atlantic with three friends on a 34' catamaran, unfortunately the skipper was a paranoid alcoholic. He had some sort of psychotic break when we got stuck in the doldrums after Cape Verde and thereafter spent most of his time on the sail bags with a machete at one side, a bottle of spirits at the other. After our fridge broke down every time he saw a container ship (the only ships we ever saw) he would radio for them to dinghy over ice! They never answered the radio. We saw six ships between Cape Verde and Brazil. The ocean is a lonely place.

(Plenty of dolphins though, especially on a stormy night with no light other than the phosphorescence of the sea spray).

[JD · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is not what I expected it to be and hoped for. It gives itself out as being about the role shipping has in the world and how we cannot live without it, which is true. But the book is about a one way voyage she took on a decent container ship with a good captain and crew from Europe to Asia through the Suez Canal, and interspersed it with what the shipping world has become with a few stories of how bad it has become for crew. While there is some interesting bits about Flags of Convenience and how intricate the system of ownership is, Somali pirates and the effect on ocean life shipping has, the book does not shed much light on how the actual shipping of "90% of everything" works. Will be looking out for other books on the subject.

[Dominic · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you are super super interested in shipping, you're going to love this book. I picked it up because of all the container shipping we've been doing with all these Wickeds. It's an interesting book but I'm happy to sum it up for you in five handy points here:

1. Don't be a sailor.
2. Seriously, it REAAAAAALLY sucks.
3. Like you'll get captured by a Somali pirate and that shit is no joke.
4. Also, the shadowy individual who owns your boat (whose name you will never know) can legally just dump your ass on any foreign shore if they decide they're tired of the boat-owning game and you'll be left without your back wages, totally in debt to skeevy money lenders and wondering how to get your Filipino self back home from St. Portsenport with the clothes on your back.
5. There is always a new developing market with people who are willing to go to sea to make $4 a week so unless you live in one of those places, it isn't going to happen anyway. So stay in school, kids.

[Caroline · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is about the merchant ships which cross our oceans, or more specifically about container transporters, as the author, Rose George, takes us on a journey on the huge container ship Maersk Kendal.



I found the book a bit piecemeal. I can understand why - George wanted to talk about the voyage she took and the people she met, rather than give us an analytical run down on the state of shipping. I do however think the book could have been greatly enhanced with the inclusion of some charts and diagrams to illustrate the way that commercial shipping has changed in recent years. Instead we got little snips as the book progressed - and I found that rather unsatisfactory. The book didn't concentrate enough on human stories to be carried forward under that umbrella, nor was it clear enough in giving us information about today's shipping, so I found it rather bitty.

One thing that did come across clearly was the incredibly tough life that a lot of sailors experience. Unlike land based companies which usually have to adhere to welfare laws, or even union pressure, it seems that on the high seas often anything goes.

I shall end with some quotes from the book with a few of the things that stood out for me...

Ship crews:

In 1961 the UK had 142,462 working seafarers, now they number around 24,000. The situation is the same with the USA - the US fleet has declined by 82 percent since 1951.

Before the oil crisis in 1973 there were British crews, British labour laws 'After that they took the companies offshore.' says the captain. They offered us contracts with 30 percent lower wages, take it or leave it."

Many of the crews are Asian. The citizens of rich countries own the ships , but they are manned by the cheap labour of Filipinos, Bangladeshis, Chinese and Indonesians. These people have lower taxes, relaxed labour laws and fewer if any unions.

British exports:

Britain is post-industrial and has little to export. 'Waste and hot air,' one laconic port official said, when I asked him what our exports consist of. He could have included weapons too, and scrap metal, exported to Turks... But that would be it.....

Flags of convenience:

Most ship owners operate decent ships that are safe, and pay their crews properly. But if you are unscrupulous, there is no better place than behind a flag. The ITF calls flags of convenience a "corporate veil". The Economist, a supporter of free markets, and so surely a supporter of this freest market of all, calls them "cat's cradles of ownership structures'.....This facility was best exposed by the oil tanker Erika which broke up off the coast of Brittany in 1999, polluting 250 miles of French coastline. .... By the end, French investigators found 12 shell companies standing between the ship and its 'beneficial owner'.... The striking thing for investigators was not just the complexity of the ownership structure, but how easy it was to put in place.

Pollution:

The International Maritime Organization calls maritime transport a 'relatively small contributor to atmospheric emissions'. It would be, if the industry weren't so successful. There is so much of it. It emits a billion tons of carbon a year and is responsible for nearly 4 percent of greenhouse gases. That is more than aviation and road transport. A giant ship can emit as much pollution into the atmosphere as a coal-fired power station.

Piracy:

Piracy is common. For instance the ship Golden Blessing was hijacked recently and was taken to Somalia. It was typical pirate prey; a low and slow tanker with no armed guards. Pirates have never capture container ships, because the freeboard (the height of the ship between water line and deck) is daunting. (The freeboard of the Maersk Kendal is 10 metres.)

The pirates are not after cargo. "They're not interested in the cargo. They only have beaches in Somalia, They can't even unload it.' All they want is the ship and the crew. Expensive cargoes mean higher ransoms, though, so they would never turn down a tanker.

Forty-two thousand merchant vessels come through the High Risk Area every year, and the distances to patrol are dizzying. A European Union Navel Forces commander, compared his force's task to that of patrolling Western Europe with a couple of police cars whose top speed is 15 miles an hour.

For most of the last decade, it has been accepted that modern piracy is the bloodless kind. These pirates are rational economic actors who understand that every ship is insured and that insurers will pay.... They operate according to understandable business norms. I read studies that analyse piracy as a 'market-dependent crime'. I read that the average profit margin for piracy in 2010 was 25-30 percent... In the same year Harvard Business School chose Somali piracy as the best business model of the year.

Armed security costs around $50,000 per transit through the High Risk Area, but it is an economical expense: some insurers now reduce premiums if armed guards are on board, by up to 75 percent. No ship carrying armed guards has yet been hijacked.

The dead man's alarm:

The rules on the bridge of the ship are strict. Any officer on watch may sit down, but he must never fall asleep. Every 11 minutes, the 'dead man's alarm' sounds, and must be switched off, to encourage wakefulness.

[Left Coast Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

At any given moment, there are 100,000 ships carrying freight over the world's oceans. The crews manning these ships have grown smaller and from more southerly parts of the world; in fact, the number of British crew working on British ships is now outnumbered by blue whales. When author Rose George learned that, she set out to find out why, sailing from England, through the Mediterranean, through the Suez, across the Indian Ocean and ultimately to Singapore.

Last year, I was flipping through some sort of trade journal and found a full-page, glossy ad for one of the major shipping companies, trying to recruit engineers to work on their ships. The "attractive salary" they were trumpeting came to slightly less than 1/4 of the pay I got at my first land-based engineering job, way back in 1996. I sat in an air-conditioned cubicle back then, in close proximity to fresh and varied food, marriageable female coworkers (a real bonus, back in those days) and a happy relationship with OSHA. What the shipping company offered was twelve-to-sixteen hour days in the filthy, hot and dangerous engine room of a ship (with engines as big as houses), bad food which gets worse each year as budgets are cut, and the threat of piracy, shipwreck, sharks and hundreds of ways to get injured each day.

Oh, and the romance of the sea.

Perfidious captains are remembered. When the cruise liner Oceanos foundered off South Africa in 1991, its captain, Yiannis Avranas, was among the first to depart the sinking vessel. Afterward, he was not apologetic. "When I give the order to abandon ship, it doesn't matter what time I leave. If some people want to stay, they can stay." Two hundred and twenty-five passengers were left on board after the lifeboats had been launched. Their rescue was coordinated not by a crew member, but by the ship's entertainer. When Moss Hills, having managed to call the Coast Guard from the bridge, was asked to identify his position, he replied, "I'm not a rank. I'm a guitarist." This is a curious thing about ships: when something goes wrong, every staff member must become a safety expert, even if usually they varnish nails or dance twice nightly in a show.

Like the previous book of George's that I read, this one was well-researched and told with a human touch. Her heart lies with the brave and hardworking souls that collectively enable our global economy to stay afloat, as it were. She is appropriately indignant at the difficulty of tracking down responsible parties when things go wrong. After an oil tanker broke up off the coast of France, polluting 250 miles of beach:

They first found a company named Tevere Shipping based in Malta. But Tevere Shipping outsourced Erika's management to a company named Panship Management and Services, based in Ravenna, Italy. Panship chartered the ship to Selmont International, registered in the offshore haven of Nassau, which was represented by Amarship of Lugano, Switzerland. Thirty percent of Tevere Shipping's capital was owned by Agosta Investments Corporation of Monrovia, Liberia. It goes on and on, a dizzying Russian doll of ownership. By the end, French investigators found twelve layers of shell companies standing between the ship and its "beneficial owner".

I am also pleased to report that she holds pirates in contempt, and does not consider them cute Disney characters but rather violent criminals who have murdered hundreds of people who were just trying to earn a living. I can hear (and share) the disgust in her voice when she mentions that Harvard Business School decided, in 2010, that their "business model of the year" was Somali piracy. Try telling that to shipping crews locked at gunpoint into sweltering metal ship holds under the tropical sun for months at a time, while the pirates and insurance companies negotiate.

An interesting book, but much of this I'd known already, so it met but did not exceed my expectations.

[Richard de Villiers · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know who came up with the title for the book but they did the author a disservice. If Sister Paul back in 8th Grade English would have been grading this book she would've given it a "C", circled the title in red and declared in big bold letters, "Has nothing to do with the story!"
Rose George has written a travelogue, an otherwise fine travelogue but one that really doesn't tell you all that much about the shipping industry. At least not in the detail that it promises. You never do learn how the "invisible industry" actually puts clothes on your back, gas in your car or food on your plate. You do learn a great deal about how rough sea life is. That doesn't mean that it is a bad book. The first three quarters actually work, mixing day to day observations with some background/historical information tossed in but then we pass the Suez Canal. It's almost as if the experience through pirate infested waters throws her off course. After that experience the book just drifts. Even a rare rescue at sea towards the end of the book finds her desperately trying to recapture the reader's attention. Her prose falls flat and seems uninspired. It stands in marked contrast to an earlier description of a tragedy at sea and even the narrative highlight of her voyage, traversing Somali waters.
Despite the 3 stars I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone splurging $28.00 for the book. Picking it up in the bargain bin or the library might work for you.

[Eric_W · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love ships. I remember looking at a silhouette picture of an old man in my ChildCraft set, his hand on the shoulders of a young boy, looking out over the sea at a three-masted schooner. The image still creates a frisson of nostalgia for something I never really experienced but always wanted. Some of that interest stemmed from four voyages on transatlantic liners to and from Europe in the fifties and sixties when I was younger, and I’m sure that my view was unrealistic and nonrepresentational as I watched movies and enjoyed the sumptuous meals. (We will NOT discuss the bouts of seasickness that preceded succeeding pleasurable days.)

I have zero interest in taking a cruise since they seem to be simply resorts with no destination and gambling dens. And the idea of dressing for dinner? And too many people! Geesh. I want to GO someplace and watch the business of shipping, to see how things work.. I’ve read accounts of traveling on freighters (a list is below of some related books) and would still like to try it some day (the mal-de-mer does give me pause, however.) This book is the next best thing.

This book does tend to take the shine off the freighter business. One thing I did not know was that while shipping is a relatively green form of transportation (well, except for the particulates), it generates considerable *noise* pollution. Supertankers can be heard coming through the sea a day before they arrive at any given location which drives away most sea life. Oil spills have been greatly reduced, however. Between 1972 and 1981, there were 223 spills. Over the last decade there were 63. An industry publicist reported, “More oil is poured down the drain by mechanics changing their engine oil than is spilled by the world’s fleet of oil tankers.”

The industry, itself, is dangerous, poorly paid (by our standards - not theirs) , and virtually unregulated, with ships being flagged under whatever country has the lowest taxes and the fewest inspectors. Double bookkeeping and non-payment of wages is common and criminal actions are impossible to prosecute. Where does a Croatian sailor attacked by a Filipino mate file a complaint? Cell phones are useless and there is no private internet so reporting incidents or getting assistance is impossible. The captain is God and Supreme Magistrate all rolled into one. “Buy your fair-trade coffee beans by all means, but don’t assume fair-trade principles govern the conditions of the men who fetch it to you. You would be mistaken.”

Piracy is not the glorified practice of movies and childhood. (Harvard Business School chose Somali piracy as the “business model of the year” in 2010.) The author spent a week on an EU counter-piracy patrol vessel which reduced the number of incidents from 200 in 2009 to only thirteen in 2013, but ships passing through the Gulf of Aden (and more than half do to get to the Suez canal) still must hide out in safe rooms on board if fighting them off with firehoses fails, while awaiting naval rescue. Crews are like prisoners even while not under attack, live basically on two decks. (Samuel Johnson famously wrote that “being on a ship is like being in jail, with the chance of being drowned.” Yet “When the academic Erol Kahveci surveyed British prison literature while researching conditions at sea, he found that “the provision of leisure, recreation, religious service and communication facilities are better in U.K. prisons than … on many ships our respondents worked aboard.” ) Mostly we ignore, or chose to remain ignorant, of seafarers. “ in 2011, 544 seafarers [were] being held hostage by Somali pirates. I try to translate that into other transport industries; 544 bus drivers, or 544 cabdrivers, or nearly two jumbo jets of passengers, mutilated and tortured for years. When thirty-three Chilean miners were trapped underground for sixty-nine days in 2010, there was a media frenzy. Fifteen hundred journalists went to Chile and, even now, the BBC news website maintains a special page on their drama, long after its conclusion. The twenty-four men on MV Iceberg held captive for a thousand days were given no special page and nothing much more than silence and disregard.”

The company she sails with is Maersk, a company just slightly smaller than Microsoft yet one that hardly appears on anyones radar even though it accounts for 20% of Denmark’s GDP. The ship is the Kendall. She uses that voyage as a springboard to discuss the impact of shipping on the ecology, piracy, anti-piracy and the business of shipping. Chapters focus on different issues: poor working conditions, a trip on one of the patrol boats, a pirate’s trial leading to a discussion of the different perspectives on Somalian piracy (she is not at all sympathetic,) and the huge amount of tonnage lost at sea and what the effect might be of floating Nikes and sunken computers (not good.)

The economics of shipping are rather mind-boggling. Would you have guessed that it’s cheaper to ship fish to China from Scotland to be filleted and processed than to pay Scottish workers to do it? Shipping blouse from China to the U.S. coast less than one cent, even while the large container ships burn thousand of dollars of bunker fuel (like tar and about as dirty) per hour. Containers have made loading and unloading so fast that sailors and officers have no time in port to relax.

Security is a huge issue in her mind. Only a minute portion of containers are ever inspected and they are used to smuggle all sorts of goods and probably weapons. “ One of the crew tells me he can overcome the blankness of the boxes, although that’s not how he phrases it. He can break a container seal and reseal it convincingly, although I suspect his intent would be for monetary, not intellectual, gain. This skill is more common than it should be. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported on a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol study that “existing container seals provided inadequate security against physical intrusion.” Criminals who don’t know how to reseal a seal could do an adequate workaround by taking the door off. Much of modern security rests on theater and assumption. That applies to airport lines, questionable laws about liquids, and the supposed safety of twenty million containers containing who knows what. Who does know? Only 1 to 3 percent of containers in Europe are physically inspected.”

Really interesting book. BUT, I still want to take a voyage on a freighter.


Recommended reading:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... (anything by Max Hardberger)
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Greg Streech · Rating 1 out of 5]

What might have been a "must read" book was nothing but a series of semi-related term papers. Pretty disappointed that the author (I've already forgotten her name) spent more time discussing her vegetarian diet needs than on the companies operating these shipping lines. What about a chapter on how these boxes get on the ship? Or how about how do they design and build these rigs? Or maybe the actual operations and process of stopping or turning a ship? The chapters about whale watching and sonic impediments are perfect examples of the author's inability to focus on the main topic. At least there is room for someone to write a good book on this subject.

[Marsha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many books come along that state how a certain innovation, product or idea changed the world. The substitution of sugar for honey, domestication of the horse, creation of manned flight and invention of the telephone all shaped our modern worlds in ways that still continue to resonate. But refined sugar has been discovered to be bad for us, hardly anybody rides a horse except for recreation, lots of people are terrified to fly and will do almost anything to avoid it and the landline is going the way of the dinosaur.

But shipping remains a constant. Much to my surprise or that of many people, shipping supplies most of everything that we use, consume, wear or handle. A young man aspiring for a career was told by his mother that people will always rely on ships and those who man them. She was right. We have reached the point where we literally cannot do without transport vessels. There are many goods that simply can’t be transported by plane because of their weight and overland shipping would take too long or be prohibitively expensive.

Ms. George spent time on a ship watching out for whales, dodging pirates (or trying to find them), battling seasickness and probing the history of the unsung and often detested or overlooked seaman to see what constitutes this vital aspect of modern-day life and delineate it for the eager reader. The result is this superlative book.

Ninety Percent of Everything outlines in in-depth and clear-eyed prose just what lies behind shipping, its bewildering regulations, its history, the toils and travails of the men who work on these sea-bound vessels, the terror of foul weather and crushing boredom of endless days of looking at nothing but water. Ms. George talks about books about ships (which, naturally, prove of little interest to those who actually sail), shipwrecks, stories of life on rafts, the difficulty of making sea rescues, the loss of goods and human lives at sea with clarity and detail, managing to maintain the delicate balance between a sheer boring recitation of numbers, facts and dates and glorious storytelling that captures the imagination.

This book deserves its place on the shelves beside Salt, Cod or even The Professor and the Madman as a testament to those mundane, humble underpinnings of the world that human beings take for granted.

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rose George--she of scatological fame--is back at it. In Ninety Percent of Everything, she delves into the shipping industry. The sheer magnitude of it. The damage done to sea life. And above all, the human cost: the dangers of being a victim of (mostly Somali) piracy, the risk of capsizing, and the devastating, mind-boggling, never-ending life of loneliness.

The "merchant navy," as they are called, are often overlooked. The military navy, they get medals and honorifics and glory, but the merchant navy--without which our world would not even remotely function--are either overlooked entirely, or degraded. By the public, by their governments, by international organizations, and above all, by the companies that employ them (though admittedly, Maersk, the massive Danish company on whose boat Rose George hitched a ride for several months, seems better than some).

There are remarkably few employees on these massive ships.

The shipping industry was revolutionized by the invention of the shipping container in 1956--that's why we can order things from China for so little, via Amazon or Wish or any other website that has suspiciously cheap shipping.

The members of our merchant navy don't even know what's in the containers they carry, though, unless it's dangerous, flammable, or explosive. That said, most shipping containers are not searched, it's all about whether the shipping company declares it at customs. Drugs are frequently shipped. And in 2003, ABC news successfully shipped uranium from Jakarta to Los Angeles to expose these weaknesses in port barriers (the Department of Homeland Security was not amused).

-----WILDLIFE-----

Propeller death is somewhat popular in the news (especially for manatees, though the victims of shipping tend to be whales and dolphins). But there's another major hazard created by the industry: noise pollution.

A very interesting tidbit: the week after 9/11, when ships and airplanes around the US Coast almost halted entirely, underwater noise dropped by 6 decibels. And whale stress hormones dropped proportionately lower, too.

How do we know that? We measure their poo on a regular basis, apparently. It floats. And smells. We've trained sniffer dogs, who get on boats and help researchers locate it. Who knew?

-----PIRATES-----

Easily the most interesting chapter to me--even if the Somali pirate industry isn't the charming, romantic world of Captain Kidd or Pirates of the Caribbean, as Rose George admonishes us repeatedly--because there's just a lot more action (some of the other chapters could run a bit dry).

When they cross near the Somali coast, George makes her wishes known: I tell [the captain] my needs, which are vegetarian food and some pirate action. SAME.

Sadly, she doesn't get it--though the ship does pass some small, fast, and therefore suspicious-looking boats which don't take the bait. Nonetheless, she gleans a lot of interesting modern-day pirate info from the crew [and her research of course].

Interestingly, it's not clear how Somali pirates came to be. Some experts think they were local fisherman, with their small, fast boats; they were angry that huge fishing trawlers from faraway lands (Taiwan, Spain, Russian, Thailand) came to their coast and scraped the ocean floors, taking and destroying the population of lobster, tuna, and shrimp, thereby stealing their livelihood.

Others think they actually originated as the Somali coast guard, and when the national government fell in the 1990s, the coast guard turned pirate "in about a day."

Yet another group thinks the priates originated as inland gangsters who decided to try their luck on the sea.

No matter their origin, today there are probably around 4,000 pirates, and almost half of those ahve been caught and released (some even two, three, four times). It's tough to find a nation willing to prosecute them in their courts. With the risk of getting caught and tried so low, why wouldn't you do it, especially when the average Somali citizen will earn around $14,000 in their lifetime, while a pirate can scoop up twice that in one raid.

Modern piracy, unlike swashbuckler films, is largely bloodless. As one pirate puts it, "There is no problem taking a ship. It will only be taxed and released safely. There is no harm>" They can't harm the crew because the crew (and the ship) is what they'll be paid a ransom for.

Piracy is a "market dependent crime." The average profit margin for pirates in 2010 was 25-30%. Pirates are "the very essence of rational, profit-maximizing entrepreneurs described in classical economics."

Fun fact: in 2010, Harvard Business School chose Somali piracy as the best business model of the year.

But, as the author reminds us, as amusing as that might be, piracy can sometimes still be violent, even if it's not the general rule anymore. Relations between guard and prisoner can go south. Captive seafarers have been shot, or even keelhauled (I had a vague idea of what this meant before, but George describes it much more grimly than I imagined it: "A sailor is tied to a rope and dragged under the ship, from one side to the other. It is an old practice, but even modern keels have barnacles and things that rip and shred. If the man is not flayed, he will probably. drown.").

-----VERDICT-----

A pretty decent magnification of an overlooked--even dominating--presence in modern life.

"How ironic that the more ships have grown in size and consequence, the less space they take up in our imagination."

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a high chance that you are reading this on some sort of screen that arrived in your country in a container, or box, having been shipped across the oceans of the world to the high street shop of your choice. The ship that brought it was one of 40,000 that ply the world’s oceans carrying 80% of everything you purchase and 90% of the energy that you consume.

This huge global business is safely out of sight and out of mind; you’ve probably never even thought about it.

To find out about this secret behemoth, George has travelled the across the seas on container ships and naval vessels, talking to officers, crew, engineers, chaplains and dockworkers to see if she can scratch the surface of it. It is an industry that deliberately chooses opaqueness; ship owners sail under flags of convenience, regulation is scant and rarely enforced and the law seems not to apply at sea. She speaks to those who track some of the 10,000 containers that fall overboard each year, environmentalists who are trying to tell us just how polluting the ships are and goes to Somalia to see the modern pirates being tried.

In this book George concentrates more on the effects of the shipping industry, both positive and negative, considers the challenges that it faces as costs are driven down and the implications of further changes to come. Rightly so, she gets angry about lots of things, pirates, the scant respect of the law and the conditions that some crews have to suffer. This is an industry that uses the flag of convenience to escape taxes, responsibility for environmental disasters and has no desire to change at the moment, but she does get drawn into the almost romantic notion of ploughing the oceans bringing goods from faraway places. It is a good companion book to Down To The Sea With Ships by Horatio Clare. 3.5 stars

[Perri · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Book Club selection about the shipping industry- how we get 90% of our "stuff". The author boards a shipping container to learn about life in this somewhat secretive profession. It's a lot more interesting than it sounds with sea rescues, piracy, marine animals, and land sanctuary out-reaches where my dad used to volunteer. A pretty painless way to educate myself about those huge ships chugging along on the horizon

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let me start my own review by quoting from another review, this one in the NYT:

“Ninety Percent of Everything,” is timely as well as deft. It’s about shipping, and thus about globalization, and it’s a thing you’ll want in your hands after seeing “Captain Phillips” and “All Is Lost,” the new, oceangoing Tom Hanks and Robert Redford movies. Her spirited book cracks open a vast, treacherous and largely ignored world. ...In part, “Ninety Percent of Everything” is an adventure story. Ms. George — she is a vegetarian teetotaler with little experience of the sea — is permitted to catch a ride on a giant container ship, the Maersk Kendal. She resembles a cat that has sneaked aboard the Starship Enterprise. The ship carries her from the “southern English port of Felixstowe to Singapore, for five weeks and 9,288 nautical miles through the pillars of Hercules, pirate waters, and weather.” ... This book frequently broadcasts an alien, spooky glow. The ship she is aboard is immense, for example, but is staffed by only 20 people. ... The ocean itself is indifferent, implacable, deadly. Ms. George notes that 2,000 seafarers die at sea each year, and more than two ships are lost each week. These events do not make the evening news." It's just agreat review, and is well worth reading in full: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/17/boo...

As for my own thoughts ... there are so many things to like about this book. To begin with, Rose George paints a human face on those sailors, the officers and the seaman, who deliver our goods (90 percent of everything) in a way that helps define our modern world. Their life is tough and has gotten tougher as the evolving logistics means that many of them (she says two-thirds on average) now have shore leave of only a two hour period. She does a great job of explaining the changes in the industry, especially in ships that have gotten larger and larger and need fewer and fewer crew.

She says that most ships are decently run and well taken care of, but she also tells how some shipping companies take advantage of the sailors, and if the sailors complain, these shipping companies blacklist and prevent those sailors from getting another ship. She explains how flags of convenience are used to evade labor laws and also how actual ownership may be hidden by a series of shell companies. As one example, when the oil tanker Erika broke up off the coast of Brittany, the French had to go through 12 shell companies to get to the real owner.

Spending some time on a frigate assigned to anti-pirate duty, she explains how those on anti-pirate duty actually have more than a little sympathy for Somali pirates, without being sentimental or romantic about piracy in the least.

She tells us that ships are the greenest form of transport, but that shipping is not benign because there is simply so much of it. Ships create more pollution than Germany, with a huge amount of sulfur emissions. Rose George cares about the world in many ways, and she does a great job of explaining the effects of shipping the increase in shipping on whales.

She explains the importance of the Straits of Malacca. At its narrowest, the Straits are only 1.7 miles wide, and 60,000 ships pass through each year. It's a captain’s nightmare: busy, narrow, and overcrowded.

When she disembarks in Singapore at the end of her trip, you will have learned a lot and enjoyed much of this trip with her. It's a minor thing, but I wish that she had spent a little time explaining the logistics of how containers were loaded in away so that on a multi-port trip, the ones bound for a particular port could be off-loaded so quickly. Finally, her style is not particularly elegant, but it is so fitting for her subject here.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just how much of our materials & goods are transported by ship crewed by so few people is incredible. The laxness of laws regarding the ships & their crews are, too. I had no idea that Mongolia, a landlocked country, had such a large merchant fleet - on paper, at any rate. Known as 'flags of convenience', ships can & are owned by shell companies & registered in all sorts of odd places to avoid regulations & taxes.

The economics of container ships is incredibly tight. They cost tens of thousands dollars to operate per day so changes in the market can make or break an entire shipping line. Maintenance is constant & difficult with crews pared down to the bare minimum. Near ports, crews are often required to work around the clock for days at a time & yet they're fed on as little as $7/day for months on end. Fuel is expensive, so the cheapest & most polluting is used. Their environmental impact, especially on whales, is horrendous. IOW, she paints a very grim picture.

I noticed that the worst figures were usually given as plain numbers, not percentages for the emotional impact, though. IMO, this is a cheap shot. Big numbers overwhelm, but often turn out not to be nearly as bad when looked at as an overall percentage. I looked up a few & that did indeed turn out to be the case, although hard numbers are very difficult to come by. The high seas don't encourage reporting.

I also know a couple of people familiar with the trade. One worked these ships for several decades usually under the US flag & another was a tugboat captain for almost 50 years. Both agreed that the stories were probably true, but thought they were the worst, not the norm. Both also admitted that things were getting worse as the years went by, so there is definitely an ugly side & it might be as prevalent now as George makes out.

Well worth reading especially in light of the Ever Given getting stuck in the Suez Canal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Su...
It puts quite a different light on the responsibility for the accident & puts just how badly the interrupted passage was for world trade. Well narrated & definitely recommended.

[L.A. Starks · Rating 5 out of 5]

This nonfiction book is a soup-to-nuts description of ocean-going container shipping, ending with a vital history of merchant marines' overlooked bravery in war. For any reader with an interest in how things really work, this book is a guide to a hidden, vital part of the world's economy.

[Thomas Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ninety Percent of Everything
Rose George
2013
ISBN 9780805092639
Dewey 388.044
Library-of-Congress HE571
287pp.

A light introduction to shipping. The author was a passenger on a container ship, from Britain to Asia. Chapters on piracy, whales, shipwreck.

There are more than 100,000 ships at sea. p. 3: 6,000 are container ships.

Shipping is so cheap that it makes more financial sense for Scottish cod to be sent 10,000 miles to China to be filleted, then sent back to Scottish shops and restaurants, than to pay Scottish filleters. p. 18. It costs 1 cent to send a can of beer. p. 39.

Filipinos make up more than a third of all crews worldwide. p. 22. 250,000 of them are at sea. "We are cheap and speak good English." A senior government bureaucrat in Manila can earn $300 a month. p. 24. The shipping company no longer recruits in Europe. p. 54. Twenty men to run an 80,000-ton ship? All they can cut is manpower, wages, and victualing. pp, 65. 59. Fatigue is inevitable. The captain sends the crew daily news e-mails in Tagalog and English. p. 111.

40 miles long, Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe. p. 28.

There are at least 20 million containers crossing the world now. p. 38.

Grams of CO2 produced per ton-mile:
Ship 11
Truck 110
Air 1200
But there's so much shipping, ships create more pollution than Germany. p. 92.
Ship fuel is one step up from asphalt. p. 93.
In Los Angeles, half of all sulfur dioxide smog comes from ships. Ship soot causes over 100,000 respiratory-disease deaths annually. p. 96.

[awesomatik.de · Rating 3 out of 5]

In unserer globalisierten Welt kommt so gut wie alles aus dem Container.

Der Computer auf dem ich diese Zeilen schreibe, die Banane, die ich zum Frühstück gegessen habe und die Kleidung, die ich heute trage, kamen alle per Schiff um die Welt.

Und doch gehört die Schifffahrtsindustrie zu den verschwiegensten Wirtschaftszweigen auf der ganzen Welt.

Umso spannender mal einen Blick hinter die Kulissen zu werfen.

In "Ninety Percent of Everything" fährt die Autorin Rose George als Passagierin an Bord des Container Schiffs Maersk Kendal von England nach Singapur.

Trotz der gigantischen Schiffsgröße besteht die Crew nur aus 21 Personen. Hauptsächlich philippinischer Herkunft. Philipinos stellen mittlerweile die Mehrheit aller Seeleute weltweit, weil sie "günstig sind und gut englisch sprechen".

Von der ehemals großen britischen und amerikanischen Handelsmarine ist nichts mehr übrig. Die meisten Schiffe fahren nun unter der Flagge der Länder, die das lockerste Arbeitsrecht haben.

So ist es für Seefahrer fast unmöglich im Problemfall ihr Recht durchzusetzen. Zum Beispiel für einen Seemann aus Manila, der auf einem amerikanischen Schiff arbeitet, das in internationalen Gewässern unter panamaischer Flagge fährt und einen zypriotischen Manager hat.

Das ist nur einer von unzähligen interessanten Fakten, die man im ersten Teil des Buches erfährt. Außerdem spannend fand ich,

- dass Containertransporte mittlerweile so günstig sind, dass schottischer Kabeljau nur zum Filetieren nach China gebracht wird, weil es dann immer noch günstiger ist, als es vor Ort zu machen.

- dass Fairtrade Kaffee nicht bedeutet, dass die Menschen, die den Kaffee nach Europa bringen, fair bezahlt wurden

- Dass weniger Treibhausgase produziert werden um einen Container von Shanghai nach LeHavre zu bringen als von dort mit dem Laster nach Lyon

- dass 2000 Seeleute im Jahr sterben und zwei Schiffe pro Woche verloren gehen. Ein Umstand, der in der Luftfahrt einen Aufschrei auslösen würde in der Schifffahrt aber nur zur Kenntnis genommen wird.

Da auf der Überfahrt von England nach Singapur scheinbar nicht viel passiert, beleuchtet die Autorin die Entwicklung der Handelsmarine aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln.

Ein längerer Abschnitt befasst sich mit somalischen Piraten und dem Kampf gegen diese.

Ein anderer Teil behandelt die Auswirkung der Schifffahrt auf die Meeresbewohner (insbesondere auf die Wale).

Weitere Kapitel drehen sich um die Einsamkeit und sozialen Probleme der Seeleute und um Schiffsunglücke.

Zwar erfährt man auch hier interessante Aspekte der Seefahrerei. Mit dem Titel hat dies aber nicht mehr viel zu tun.

Gerne hätte ich mehr über die eigentliche Fahrt, die Crew und die Abläufe auf dem Schiff gelesen.

Aber Rose George geht es eher darum die untragbaren Bedingungen der modernen Handelsmarine ins Bewusstsein der Öffentlichkeit zu rücken, damit Seeleute irgendwann die Anerkennung bekommen, die sie verdienen.

Fazit – Unser Leben aus der Box

So langweilig die Fahrt auf einem Containerschiff auch sein mag, so spannend sind die Einblicke hinter die Kulissen der verschwiegenen Containerindustrie.

Auch wenn die Vermischung von Reisebericht und Recherche an einigen Stellen nicht aufgeht und Rose George dem Leser nur teilweise gibt, was der Titel ihres Buches verspricht, so bleibt Ninety Percent of Everything eine aufschlussreiche Abhandlung.

Eins ist klar: wer bisher eine Karriere bei der Handelsmarine in Erwägung gezogen hat, wird sich nach der Lektüre wohl eher an Land nach Jobs umschauen.

Meine Anerkennung für Seeleute ist jedenfalls immens gestiegen und ich hoffe, dass Bücher wie dieses dazu beitragen, dass sich die Arbeitssituation für all die einsamen Seelen da draußen verbessern wird.

Es sieht allerdings nicht danach aus. Mittlerweile werden nämlich Containerschiffe entwickelt, die ganz ohne Crew auskommen sollen.

Wertung 3/5

1. Geht gar nicht 2. Is OK 3. Gut 4. Richtig gut 5. awesomatik!

Alle awesomatik Rezensionen auf einen Blick:
http://awesomatik.de/buchfuhlung/


awesomatik Kuriosum

Wer sich die Lektüre sparen möchte, schaut sich einfach den sehenswerten Ted Talk der Autorin an:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7RsR...

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very well organized depiction of life at sea in the container shipping industry. World history, anthropology, piracy, and world economics are all deciphered in this account of actual travel time on a large container ship. This story of sailing the oceans brings many stories together and raises the value of all the seafarers involved in the shipping industry.

[Chris Steeden · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Friday in June and the author is boarding the massive container ship, Maersk Kendal. Just take a look at the size of this ship on Google images. It is huge. She is going to be on-board from Felixstowe to Singapore for 5 weeks and 9288 nautical miles. Kendal's actual route is Felixstowe, Bremerhaven, Rotterdam, Le Havre (The Harbour), Suez Canal, Salalah, Oman, Colombo (Sri Lanka), Straits of Malacca, Port Klang (Malaysia), Singapore, Laem Chabang (Thailand) and back again.

Rose George provides some absolutely fascinating facts, figures and statistics on all things shipping. Prepare to amazed and alarmed. Here is one 'Trade carried by sea has grown fourfold since 1970 and is still growing. There are 10,000 ships at sea carrying all the solids, liquids, gases that we need to live'. Only 6,000 of them are container vessels like the Maersk Kendal.

I have to give you this other snippet as I have been reading this out to friends and family: 'Shipping is so cheap that it makes more financial sense for Scottish cod to be sent 10,000 miles to China to be filleted and then sent back to the Scottish shops and restaurants , than to pay Scottish filleters.' Isn't that ridiculous?

There are the environmental hazards though with shipping. Soot and particulate matter from ships are responsible for 60,000 cardiopulmonary and lung cancer deaths annually the author states. How about this - in Los Angeles half of all smog from sulphur dioxide (toxic gas) comes from ships. Who is responsible for these emissions? It is such a global industry and most of the time they are in international waters. She relays a story of a livestock carrier the Danny F II which capsized and sank off Lebanon on 17 December 2009. This was carrying over 10,000 ship and 17,000 cattle. They were in international waters. The families of the crew that died never got an answer on why the ship went down. This really is the murky side of shipping.

More interesting stuff comes out of the book like the 'flag of convenience'. The two largest ship registries are Panama and Liberia. It's all about money and reducing costs. A.P.Moller-Maersk is Denmark's largest company, founded in 1904 with one ship. Now they have 600 and are active in 130 countries and employs 117,000 people. The company even drills for oil and gas, owns supermarkets and banks and brings in revenues just slightly less then Microsoft.

40,000 ships pass through the Suez Canal each year. It was opened for navigation in 1869. This means you do not have to gamble with the weather around Cape Horn. It takes 14 hours to navigate the Suez Canal. George even changes ship to go aboard and EU-NAVFOR flagship the Vasco de Gama which hunts pirates for a week from Mombasa to Mogadishu.

There are other interesting chapters where she meets a chaplain at Immingham Port in the north-east of England and goes whale watching near Provincetown, Cape Cod where she relates the dangers to the north-Atlantic Whale. Tells the story of the torpedoing by the Germans on 04-NOV-1942 of the SS City of Cairo which was on its way from Bombay to England.

A fascinating book that had me writing down many quotes, fact and figures.

[Kuang Ting · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author Rose George hopped on a container ship in England heading to Singapore.
The ship was Kendal operated by Maersk.
Maersk is one of the largest shipping company in the world.
It contributes nearly 20% of Denmark GDP, which is very impressive.
Rose is a journalist writing articles for prominent media such as New York Times and The Guardian.
The writing style of this book is similar to news articles. It gets interesting or less vigorous sometimes. Overall, it's an enjoyable read. I learn new interesting facts from the book.

Before you read this, keep in mind that it's not a industry report. It's more like a travelogue.
She booked a room on container ship to Singapore. She wrote about how the journey felt.
In addition to journey itself, related themes were discussed.
Most of the topics she chose reflected the hardness of being a seaman.
If you are expecting how 'shipping works', this book might not be for you.

The book is not very long. It has about 250 pages excluding appendix or endnotes.
There are 11 chapters:
1. Embarkation
2.Aboard
3.Harbor
4.Open Sea
5.Sea and Suez
6.High-risk Area
7.No-Man's-Land
8.Sanctuary
9.Animals Beneath
10.Rescue
11.Disembark

As you can see, some topics are clear on what you are expected to read.
Broadly speaking, chapter 1~5 discuss the shipping industry in general.
Later chapters focus on ordeal on the sea.

Rose showed us what traveling on a container ship is like. She described the sailors briefly.
The portray of sailors are somewhat lifeless. All I see are some exhausted seamen doing this hard work just to raise family. As you would expect, most of them are from Philippines or India or countries with cheap labor. They spent much of the time on board and seldom land on shore.
The environment on ship is purely boring. They miss their children's first birthday because duties are calling. Rose also mentions what seamen do during the short interval in port. They call Skype to home country, buy gifts, or simply stay on the ship. Though the writing lacks energy, I can still imagine their feeling. Good luck to any seamen.

The chapters on second half discuss the pirates, shipwrecks, stowaways, etc.
She interviewed someone abducted by pirates for several months, the negotiators, and some experts.
The stories are sad as you would expect. Some readers seem annoyed and think it deviate from the main theme of 'shipping'. Personally, I find it interesting as I learn how these behind the scene rescue take place. Rose also explains the background of the causes. For example, failure of state in Somalia makes young people desperate. They become radical for surviving. Rose had talks with different people from different perspectives. She is really a journalist knowing how to balance everyone's opinion excluding herself.

In summary, '90% of everything' is a good book to learn about shipping.
It could get a little boring from time to time.
However, the information and facts in this book are interesting and even useful.
I bought it at a bargain which makes it a satisfactory read.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting and at many times depressing look at an industry that goes largely unnoticed by our modern society. I really appreciated the many issues approached by the author - seafarers' rights (or lack thereof), the change of shipping over the years, shipping's carbon emissions, the issue of ship strikes and whales, piracy, the merchant navy in the wars. Each chapter was illuminating about a different issue I had rarely considered before. The book would have really benefited from a map (or several maps), as it could be hard to track where exactly the ship was without a better knowledge of shipping routes and marine geography. I also would've appreciated more focus on the lower crew members, especially the Filipino crew members who make up so much of the shipping industry - they often seemed to get lost in the details, which seemed a real lost opportunity to give a voice to workers who don't usually get that opportunity. Overall, a really solid and informative read.

[Brooks · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read George's The Big Necessity and really enjoyed it. Working in Supply Chain, I thought I would really enjoy her take on ocean shipping. Maybe I am too close to the industry and really did not enjoy this book. As with other books of this genre, it pulls together history and interesting stories around one theme with some tangible link to pull them into a cohesive book. For this one, the book really didn't hold together. Rose George had the opportunity to travel from England to Singapore on a large container ship. She focuses on the current conditions in shipping. The low wage workers, the transition of skill officers to those same low wage countries, and life away from family for long periods of time. She covers the industry transition to containers via interviews with the captain of the ship. But she also haphazardly covers some related injustices:
- Treatment of merchant marines in WWII. Since they were not in uniform, treated as cowards by many on the streets. Eventhough they face worse hazards and risks in the shipping.
- Flags of convenience - How ships are registered in the most lack countries for regulation.
- Ocean piracy. It was almost like a separate article on piracy and the lawlessness in Somalia.
- Shipwrecks - There were several stories of survival and death due to shipwrecks from WWI and WWII. The interesting part is that many modern ships do not respond to maydays as it affects their schedules. That one shocked me, especially given how poorly regulated and frequency of sinkings.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

The start of a long journey is always the best bit, as you set out with anticipation and promise - a bit like this book. It began strongly, the style and the narrative engaging from the outset as the author joins a the crew of a massive container ship sailing from England to the Far East. It’s made clear that these are the vessels that service our world with innumerable material goods from all corners of the globe, without which we wouldn’t have the lifestyles we currently enjoy (providing you enjoy having and obtaining “stuff” that you probably could live without, in reality). This isn’t a discourse for or against consumerism though, just an examination of the global supply chain we have developed.
As we head for Somalia, however, the book for me sailed into the doldrums. Tales of modern day pirates should be exciting, but I found this part of the book a bit lifeless and somewhat dull. The author tries to inject tension into the voyage but becomes distracted into giving a lot of background and history that takes us off the ship when I would have preferred to stay on it. I think I was more inclined to be interested in the people and crew the author met on the voyage, but I began to wonder if the blokes attracted to this kind of life are a bit dull themselves. They came across that way. That’s not my memory of a similar book to this I once read, Steaming to Bamboola by Charles Buckley, which captured the sailor’s world with much more colour and excitement. Resultantly, my interest in the this book faded and I left it unfinished.

[Kitty · Rating 5 out of 5]

More shit I had no idea about and will never fully comprehend

[Kathrin Passig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fing gut an, war dann aber leider doch wieder so ein Buch, bei dem offenbar eine bestimmte Anzahl von Seiten vollgestopft werden musste. Viele Kapitel Füllmaterial. Die Hauptgeschichte über die Fahrt auf dem Containerschiff ist interessant, aber die zum Teil mehrere Kapitel langen Abschweifungen (Piraten, Wale, Geschichten ganz anderer Schiffe) habe ich gegen Ende nur noch überflogen.

[Alex Prins · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that does what it sets out to do: humanise the seafarers that keep the global economy ticking along, whilst exposing the unnecessary hardships and danger they are exposed to with a righteous anger that is borne from many weeks spent in the company of these seamen.

[Nikiverse · Rating 3 out of 5]

a little dry (ha), but chock full of information. Somali pirates, WHALES, animals on container ships, wrecks, port churches, multi-national nature of the container ships, rules and lack of, WHALES, ...
an interesting world on the sea that I honestly don't think much about.

shout out to my library for letting me accidentally borrow this for over a year :/

3.5 stars!

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 4 out of 5]

90% of everything moves by ship, but these days we barely think about shipping. It's just something that happens. Rose George has written an interesting book about the human experience of maritime shipping today, but one that I wish got a little more technical.

The book is structured around a journey from the UK to Singapore on the Maersk Kendal, a 300m containship capable of hauling almost 6500 standard contains or 75000 tons of cargo. Kendal is captained by a senior Brit with 40 years of maritime experience, and crewed by a multi-ethnic group of 20 men and one woman (the cook), mostly Filipino, but with Indians, Ukrainians, and Chinese as well. The first line on being a sailor on one of these ships is "don't". Pay is miserable, conditions are worse, with long hours, bad food, and a very real risk of death.

While tradition has the Captain as sole authority at sea, these days he's the man who responsible for adjudicating costs and risks between the ship, its owners, its management charter, the sailor's commissioning agents, the cargo owner, insurers, the flag registry, etc, with many of these groups hidden behind layers of international shell companies. For the average sailor turning a wrench, this means that a job with 14 hour days, no breaks, no friends, and sub-US minimum wages can easily turn into one where you haven't been paid in months, the shipping company is demanding that you set sail in an unsafe vessel, and the people who have the power to literally save your life are insulated by so many layers of lawyers they're untouchable.

George spices up the rather humdrum voyage with pirate hunting in Somalia, work at a sailor's mission in the UK, whale biologists attempting to reduce the environmental impacts of shipping, and a history of shipwrecks and survival in the open sea. She's a skilled non-fiction writer. But what drops the book a star for me is that George can't seem to muster up any enthusiasm for the stuff of shipping. Containization and computerized cargo management have revolutionized logistics. The ships are the largest mobile objects ever created by man. But given an opportunity to go down into one of the massive maneuvering thrusters, George demurs: It's too dark, too cramped, too noisy, too clammy.

Please. You're writing 300 pages of shipping. At least see the whole ship.

[Alesa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a five-star book, which lost a star because of what I felt was padding at the end. But 90 percent of the book is awesome. (haha)

Rose George, a journalist, did a very courageous thing. She signed on to sail from Rotterdam to Singapore on a Maersk freighter, a world inhabited almost exclusively by men, to write about the virtually unknown commercial shipping industry. She details the exhausting, dangerous, boring and poorly paid existence of seafarers today as they transport the bulk of the world's traded goods from continent to continent.

The reader learns a lot about modern-day pirates and the havoc they wreak on shipping. (In fact, discussion of, and fear of, pirates comprises a large portion of the book.) We experience the awful food aboard a ship, the ceaseless engine noise, and the fatigue that comes from long watches and too-short shore leaves. It's a global culture, where crews can have men from a dozen or more nationalities. And it's perilous; seafarers die at a rate ten times greater than land-based occupations.

Shipping is cheap and efficient, compared with other types of transport. However, because the industry is so enormous, it's having a big environmental impact. Ships emit more greenhouse gases than all aviation and road transport. They create more pollution than the entire country of Germany.

These are things that we rarely even think of when we purchase our cheap goods from Asia, or food and gas from other continents. The book is a compelling read, and an eye-opener.

[David Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading this book you will want to knit a warm cap for a seafarer. It should be required reading for everyone on the planet since we are indebted for just about everything we buy to the invisible and largely ignored "human element" upon which modern shipping is still begrudgingly dependent. Rose George travels 9000 miles on a Maersk container ship but her curiosity travels much further. This is the best treatment of Somali piracy I have read, and she also goes on pirate duty with the Portuguese navy. The author's moral offense at piracy is well communicated. It is clear that Rose George did not want her journey to end. And this is the paradox. A life at sea is one of the least desirable jobs in the world, and yet people continue to choose this exile, out of necessity. Our ports have become invisible and inscrutable, but behind the blankness of those containers are people who deserve our notice, respect and advocacy.