Read Online Ninety Percent of Everything Inside Shipping the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back Gas in Your Car and Food on Your Plate Rose George 9781250058294 Books
Read Online Ninety Percent of Everything Inside Shipping the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back Gas in Your Car and Food on Your Plate Rose George 9781250058294 Books
Download As PDF : Ninety Percent of Everything Inside Shipping the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back Gas in Your Car and Food on Your Plate Rose George 9781250058294 Books
On ship-tracking Web sites, 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, and so we must ship. Without shipping there would be no clothes, food, paper, or fuel. Without all those dots, the world would not work. Yet freight shipping is all but invisible. Away from public scrutiny, it revels in suspect practices, dubious operators, and a shady system of "flags of convenience." 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.
Read Online Ninety Percent of Everything Inside Shipping the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back Gas in Your Car and Food on Your Plate Rose George 9781250058294 Books
"This book didn’t deliver at all on the promise of telling the stories about how all our goods are provided by freighters carrying containers of goods. Very disappointing and shallow book. Makes me wonder if there was an editor involved. Perhaps it was a book developed by marketers since there’s a real interest in this topic. But this book just doesn’t deliver. Not even close. Unfortunately.
There was really very little in this book about shipping and freight containers. It was a free association by the author during and about her trip on a freighter. A real disappointment!"
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Ninety Percent of Everything Inside Shipping the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back Gas in Your Car and Food on Your Plate Rose George 9781250058294 Books Reviews :
Ninety Percent of Everything Inside Shipping the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back Gas in Your Car and Food on Your Plate Rose George 9781250058294 Books Reviews
- The title of Rose’s book clues us in to her first main point ninety percent of the food we eat and the things that fill our homes, cupboards, offices, and yards comes to us by sea. Her second point is that, even as we depend more and more on ships to bring us all that stuff, the industry has become more and more invisible. Ports have moved to deeper, more secure harbors away from cities; the goods transported by ships are hidden away in generic containers; and many ships fly “flags of convenience†that conceal who owns them leaving troubling questions about responsibility when one sinks (as two do per week) and or when a crew member dies at sea (as do two thousand per year). Rose, a self-confessed landlubber, boards a container ship for a five-week voyage to give us an inside view of it all, from ports to pirates, from storms to the solitary lives of the crew. She has to leave the ship on a few “side trips†to complete her picture (which interrupts the continuity of the voyage) and the reading is slow in spots, but, for the most part, she provides revelation after revelation on a subject I was too ignorant to know how ignorant I was.
- This book didn’t deliver at all on the promise of telling the stories about how all our goods are provided by freighters carrying containers of goods. Very disappointing and shallow book. Makes me wonder if there was an editor involved. Perhaps it was a book developed by marketers since there’s a real interest in this topic. But this book just doesn’t deliver. Not even close. Unfortunately.
There was really very little in this book about shipping and freight containers. It was a free association by the author during and about her trip on a freighter. A real disappointment! - Do you realize that 90% of the goods we use world wide are transported on the seas around the world and this book deals the container ships and the people who mostly live and work in obscurity. The author hitches a ride on one of these modern day container ships with the largest one being able to carry 15,000 20 foot metal boxes. Do you realize how much product can be moved in one trip. The ship that she rides on hold almost 7,000 containers.
She introduces to us the people that are working on these ships and the conditions they work under with more modern technology and less people on the ships. The nationalities have changed along with the wages and the way the owners take care of the crews. The food that was being served on this ship was pretty sad. With modern day news you are probably aware of the pirate problem on long the Somali coast and there is a chapter or two that deal with this which in my opinion is were this book bogs down a little bit. She also talks about the merchants from the time around WW 1 and WW2 and especially moving story about Diana Jarmin. There is a chapter about all these boats and ships on the water and the effects on the sea life.
I would give this book a 3 1/2 star rating it is a decent read. - Rose George's book is shows us a small slice of what the shipping world is like. George experiences first hand a tiny sample of life on a ship and looks into the lives of some of the characters she meets along the way. Her account includes a bit about piracy, working conditions, economic inequality, environmental issues, and everyday life on a ship. I think her insight is valuable, especially for those wholly unfamiliar with the shipping industry. Could it be more complete? Sure. I think that the shipping industry is so huge and complex that to deep dive into each of its facets would result in an unreadable mess. George is a journalist and her writing style makes for an easy, enjoyable read. If you are interested in the shipping industry, you'll enjoy the book.
- My grandmother came from a seafaring family on the coast of Ireland, and as a little boy I heard countless tales of men at sea (women didn't go to sea except as passengers in her day). Seafaring life sounded dangerous yet fascinating. My relatives in Ireland continued going to sea, but I realize that fewer did so in each succeeding generation, and this book explains why. Most ships fly "flags of convenience" from countries that have little to do with the ship or crew itself. The crews can come from anyplace, and the ownership of ships is often buried in layers of charters and corporate fronts.
The author goes on a trip from Britain to Singapore on a Maersk ship with a British master and an international crew. We get to know the master, who is at the end of his career, and many of his crew members. She details just how monotonous the trip is, and how dangerous it is as the ship goes around the Horn of Africa. Rather than let us suffer through a dreary accounting of that voyage, she digresses into stories about various aspects of the shipping industry.
The author tells us about ships that sink, ships that are abandoned when it's no longer profitable to run them (along with their unfortunate crews), the abuses that come along with the Flag of Convenience system, and mostly the difficulty of going to sea. The shipping business has changed greatly from my great grandfather's time. In his day, there were still sailing ships, and ships under power burned coal. The crew sizes were much larger, and cargo loading and unloading was done by hand. A ship might be in port for weeks while its cargo was unloaded and new cargo loaded.
The author explains how today ships have much smaller crews. With containerization loading and unloading takes hours instead of days or weeks. The city docks in port cities are closed, and now the ships pull up to container ports far away from the centers of the cities. The crews get little or no shore leave, so basically they spend months confined to the ship with no release from the monotony.
I found the book fascinating, but I was disappointed to see that seafaring life isn't what it was in my great grandfather's time. In some ways it has improved (seaman aren't locked in chains or shanghaied like they were in his day), but in other ways it has gotten worse. Being a seafarer has never been easy, and the author effectively conveys this message. However, I always thought being a merchant seaman would be an adventurous life, but that era apparently has passed. I find that very sad.
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