The Outlaw Sea

A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime

De: William Langewiesche

Narrado por: William Langewiesche

Duración: 7 h y 34 m

Resumen del Editor

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 it 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.

Listen to Terry Gross' conversation with William Langewiesche on Fresh Air.

©2004 William Langewiesche (P)2004 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC

Reseñas de la Crítica

"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." (Publishers Weekly)
"Langewiesche, an Atlantic Monthly correspondent, might be the best investigative magazine journalist working today....His writing is impossibly thorough and powerfully understated..." (Entertainment Weekly)
"Langewiesche's narrative achieves an almost operatic grandeur..." (The New York Times Book Review)

Interesting Listen...

This was a very insightful audiobook. One might think that a story about the sea and shipping would be somewhat boring, but the author did a great job of revealing many of the mysteries of the shipping industry and the people who make up its ranks. Also kind of scary to realize how dependant we are on the ships for getting our goods to and fro, and how vulnerable and difficult to manage the whole system is.

Definitely an interesting book, but narration could be better.

The book covers in entertaining and dramatic fashion 3 or 4 major maritime incidents and the underlying, problematic conditions (brought on by the lack of law and order on the seas) which led to their occurrences.

I enjoyed it, and learned quite a lot, but the narration is tough. It is read by the author, and his delivery needs some coaching. The whole way through, every word sounds as though it is DRIPPING with caustic scorn. I get that it’s not a lighthearted topic, and there are definitely some genuine targets presented for such judgment (feckless government regulators, cowards, conspiracy theorists, negligent crew, pirates, LAWYERS EVEN), but I think it would sound the same way if this guy read Green Eggs and Ham.

wow!

this is an absolutely brilliant, non-fiction book that gives a very beautiful glimpse into the world's oceans and the shipping and sailing that appear goes upon it

Fascinating

I found this book well written and quite intriguing. It raises questions on very important issues facing the world oceans and international shipping industry. Such as safety security environmental pollution’s and regulatory enforcement on shipping maintenance and merchant worker protection

Awesome

This is an eye-opening and interesting book, which in narrated superbly.

There are several agencies world wide that book tourists on cruise vacations aboard cargo ships. Some of the new ships have guest cabins; others offer to accommodate passengers in the owner's cabin. They are low cost, and offer low to no frills open ocean getaways with no on-board crowds and stops at exotic ports of call. How fun...

That's what I used to think. After this book, I would not even consider a trip aboard a cargo ship, and anyone thinking about one should read this book. The high seas is a shady underworld of shell companies that operate with no enforceable regulation. I am not even sure I would consider going on a commercial tourist cruise any more.

Again: a really interesting book.

Informative and engaging

A human examination of the vast and impersonal world of oceanic transportation. I really did not like the intro and outro music.

Most authors shouldn't read their own books

i appreciate that an author knows his own material well enough to speak about it, but most authors lack the training to read their work in entirety without making a repetitive snoozer out of it, or garnishing it with awful dose of sincerity, or sarcasm.

on the content:
the book is disproportionately balanced in covering the wrecked Estonia. this shipwreck affords Langewiesche a jaw-dropping prose bonanza when he at last describes the survival-of-the-fittest series of events when the ship goes down. but the examination of the tangled investigation is too well trod, and at times too well revisited. this author is a gifted prose stylist, but because his treatment focuses on narrow, articulate examinations of particular ships and straits, i finished the book feeling still uninformed about the breadth of contemporary shipping in our world. there is only a touch of historical context, only a few nods to the geophysics of our ocean world. nonetheless, i would probably read other books by this author.

Good Subject, Poor Narrator Choice

This book is way too long given the material the author presented. This could have been presented easily in half the time. There are excruciatingly long descriptions of ocean going disasters that do not bring much to the story.

Additionally, the narrator's voice (the narrator happens to be the author) is AWFUL!! I mean if such things as annual Monotone Awards were given, he would be the hands down winner!!. If a better narrator had been used (such as George Guidall or Michael Kramer for example) the book would have been actually exciting at times. If the narrator approaches life with the same "enthusiasm" he projects with his voice, it's certainly no surprise how this book turned out to be so dull.

I wasted my money on this. I gave it two stars, because during those times when the author was not spending hours describing one incident, it did give me a glimpse of the nature of traveling the high seas.