The New York Times
The book ends in a place called Alang on the Gulf of Cambay in the Arabian Sea, where worn-out ships are driven onto the beach and cut into scrap by Indian laborers who are primitively equipped and in almost constant danger...Watching the mammoth metal corpse of a ship being carved into pieces, he cannot help seeing the eviscerated wreck as "a monument to the forces of a new world." As he demonstrates time and time again in this brave, often electrifying book, it is a world that is both new and very old, and we ignore it at our peril.—Nathaniel Philbrick
The New Yorker
For Langewiesche, the ocean is still a frontier, a lawless domain where brute economics always trumps moral considerations. His overview ranges from a story of contemporary piracy off the coast of Indonesia to a portrait of the ship-breaking yards of India, where workers die by the dozen. The centerpiece of his exploration is the sinking, in 1994, of the ferry Estonia in the Baltic Sea, in which more than eight hundred and fifty people died. In harrowing detail, Langewiesche describes the chaos—sons abandoning mothers, criminals robbing fellow-passengers amid the confusion—and then follows the botched investigation that ensued. He makes an eloquent case that the ocean’s forgotten corners have become too dangerous to neglect: Al Qaeda has begun to use freighters to smuggle its members across international borders.
Publishers Weekly
"Our world is an ocean world, and it is wild," Langewiesche writes. He then poses a powerful question: have the industrialized nations of the world given up control of the shipping industry to the demands of the free market? And if this free market is indeed the most efficient and profitable system, what price, socially, politically and environmentally will it extract from the human beings who use it? From the panic-stricken bridge of a sinking oil tanker to the filth-clogged beaches resulting from a destroyed ship in India, Langewiesche (American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center) vividly describes a global cabal of unscrupulous ship owners, well-intentioned but overmatched regulators, and poorly trained and poorly paid seamen who risk their lives every day to make this new global economy function. "It is not exactly a criminal industry," Langewiesche explains, "but it is an amoral and stubbornly anarchic one." Accidents happen with alarming regularity. A sobering account of the 1994 sinking of the passenger ferry Estonia in the Baltic is the centerpiece of this book. Brutally handled, poorly maintained and perhaps fatally flawed in design, the ship capsized and sank in a raging gale, taking 852 unsuspecting people to a watery grave. Langewiesche painstakingly details the botched accident investigation-complete with bureaucratic incompetence, backpedaling elected officials and the persistent efforts of a German journalist with conspiracy on her mind. In the end, no conclusion was drawn, and the Estonia sits at the bottom of the Baltic, a silent monument to the cost of a free market gone awry. Equal parts incisive political harangue and lyrical reflection on the timelessness of the sea, this book brilliantly illuminates a system the world economy depends upon, but will not take responsibility for. Agent, Chuck Verrill. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
This latest work from the prolific Atlantic Monthly investigative reporter is a genuine page-turner, but it suffers from an amorphousness common to books expanded from several separate stories into a narrative less significant than its disturbing parts. Over a third of the text is taken up with recounting the avoidable 1994 sinking of the Estonia in a storm on a routine run to Sweden and the spin-controlled aftermath. This was a sad and terrifying incident, but the dissection of the competing legal proceedings that followed are inconclusive, and the sheer volume of attention assigned this disaster diminishes far shorter anecdotes on contemporary piracy and the South Asian ship-breaking industry. Langewiesche's thesis-that the seas are as anarchic and ruthless as they are vast-would have been better served by a lengthier narrative. Langewiesche's American Ground, a report on the Ground Zero cleanup, was praised generally but denounced bitterly by New York City firefighters; his efforts here are evenhanded to the point of not offering a memorable argument. Yet given that each chapter is masterly by itself and that the Estonia episode did not appear on its own in the Atlantic, this is worthy of acquisition by a range of pubic libraries and inclusion in maritime/criminology academic collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/03.]-Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Lest we forget: The ocean is cold, cruel, and unforgiving. Even though the vast majority of the Earth's surface is salt water, as the comparatively small landmass is increasingly tamed and corralled, it becomes easy to forget that the teeming seas have not and never can be controlled or organized in any meaningful manner. Langewiesche (American Ground, 2002, etc.) takes it upon himself to remind readers of this in an effective, occasionally savage text. Although the author spends some time discussing one of the open sea's more modern threats, terrorism (Osama bin Laden purportedly owns a small fleet of ghost freighters), he first deals with a problem so old many probably thought it gone for good: piracy. "Naval patrols hardly matter at all," notes Langewiesche in typically dry, dour fashion: 1,200 pirate attacks were recorded between 1998 and 2002. He deals in depth with one: the Alondra Rainbow, hijacked in the Strait of Malacca in 1999 by a highly coordinated band who tossed its crew into the sea in a life raft. The castaways were rescued ten days later, but the ship itself, worth some $20 million with its cargo, simply disappeared. Whether discussing hijacking, the black market in dismantled ships, or the horrors of ferry accidents, Langewiesche again and again beats home the point that the sea is uncontrollable. This fact of nature is exacerbated by the shadowy man-made rules of ship registration: a vessel can sail under one nation's flag, be registered by another, and claim as "owners" a murky network of companies that are often no more than brass nameplates on a door. There are times when one wishes to tie Langewiesche down and make him follow his streams of thought more thoroughly;this work could well have been a third longer, but what is here is nevertheless impressive and well-wrought. Adapted from an article he wrote for the Atlantic, a fiery piece of work that speaks from a primal and awesome place.
