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Loading... The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crimeby William Langewiesche
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. What I've read of Langewiesche's leads me to believe the man is a master of detail. He puts a lot of detail into his writing without ever seeming to burden his gripping naratives. In The Outlaw Sea he's interested in the anarchic nature of the world's oceans and seas. He doesn't comes off as a crusader condeming the multinational shipping corporations; he's simply relating the facts and savoring the ambiguities that dog human activity in the watery realm. no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0865475814, Hardcover)Riveting stories of our last frontier and the acts of God and man upon it Even if we live within sight of the sea, it is easy to forget that our world is an ocean world. The open ocean--that vast expanse of international waters--begins just a few miles out and spreads across three-fourths of the globe. It is a place of storms and danger, both natural and manmade. And at a time when every last patch of land is claimed by one government or another, it is a place that remains radically free. With typically understated lyricism, William Langewiesche explores this ocean world and the enterprises--licit and illicit--that flourish in the privacy afforded by its horizons. Forty-three thousand gargantuan ships ply the open ocean, carrying nearly all the raw materials and products on which our lives are built. Many are owned or managed by one-ship companies so ghostly that they exist only on paper. They are the embodiment of modern global capital and the most independent objects on earth--many of them without allegiances of any kind, changing identity and nationality at will. Here is free enterprise at its freest, opportunity taken to extremes. But its efficiencies are accompanied by global problems--shipwrecks and pollution, the hard lives and deaths of the crews, and the growth of two perfectly adapted pathogens: a modern and sophisticated strain of piracy and its close cousin, the maritime form of the new stateless terrorism. This is the outlaw sea--perennially defiant and untamable--that Langewiesche brings startlingly into view. The ocean is our world, he reminds us, and it is wild. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:54 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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The author is not a left wing radical at all, he seems a very typical small c conservative if anything, and yet he finds the unregulated nature of the sea deeply concerning - in terms of piracy, rotten ships, poorly regulated passenger boats, terrorism, and pollution.
He's undoubtedly right. The accounts of shipwrecks (and the poor state and utter lack of control in most of the world's merchant ships) are chilling on both a personal and a social level. The book review I read before buying this said that the reviewer did not finish the chapter on the Estonia ferry disaster. Neither did I.
Having been sailing on small boats I have infinite respect for the sea, and this book certainly increased that - it also highlights the scale - it really is possibly for pirates to steal a massive container ship and never be caught, even in the modern world of radar and satellites.
The final chapter explores the ethical dilemmas of the famous ship-breaking yards of South Asia (where boats are simply run up on the beach to be dismantled by hand...this includes tanker sized vessels). Western efforts to regulate yards in more responsible countries like India, have, if anything, forced the trade elsewhere while ruining livelihoods. Having recently met someone who had visited the same breaking yard and said much the same thing, it is yet another reminder that little about the modern world is simple. The same can be said of many of the issues raised in this book. (