Sunday, April 30, 2017

NINETY PERCENT OF EVERYTHING, Rose George's tales from the world of shipping



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

Picador
$17 trade paper, available now

Rating:

The Publisher Says: 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.

My Review: Rose George is Mary Roach said with an English accent. I love lines like this:
I like that Maersk is a first name. It's like a massive global corporation named Derek.
Who can resist reading stuff by someone with this gamine grin in her prose?

Trade has always traveled and the world has always traded. Ours, though, is the era of extreme interdependence. Hardly any nation is now self-sufficient. In 2011, the United Kingdom shipped in half of its gas. The United States relies on ships to bring in two-thirds of its oil supplies. Every day, thirty-eight million tons of crude oil sets off by sea somewhere, although you may not notice it. As in Los Angeles, New York, and other port cities, London has moved its working docks out of the city, away from residents. Ships are bigger now and need deeper harbors, so they call at Newark or Tilbury or Felixstowe, not Liverpool or South Street.

In 2009, Lloyd's List reported that Maersk had sent a memo headed "Zero Recruitment in Europe." The columnist was scathing. "Famously, there are already more blue whales than there are British seafarers on British ships. The difference is that people are taking conservation measures to save the whale."

All workforces have waves and changing of guards. There were lascars and now there are Filipinos. But the diminishment of British and American merchant navies is unprecedented. There is regular fretting about recruitment in the pages of the shipping press. Some British seafarers plan to retire early or move into shore jobs. The captain [of her ship]...can be cold about his job—it is moving giant boxes, and that is that—but the force of his anger about his changed industry conveys something other than coldness. Before the oil crisis in 1973, there were British crews, British labor laws. After that they took the companies offshore. They offered us contracts with thirty percent lower wages, take it or leave it."
Same as it ever was in labor-versus-capital relations, isn't it.



THE BOX, demystifying the invisible world-changing role of shipping


THE BOX: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
MARC LEVINSON

Princeton University Press
$19.95 paperback and ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. "The Box" tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in transportation costs that containerization brought about.

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of the first container voyage, this is the first comprehensive history of the shipping container. It recounts how the drive and imagination of an iconoclastic entrepreneur, Malcom McLean, turned containerization from an impractical idea into a massive industry that slashed the cost of transporting goods around the world and made the boom in global trade possible.

But the container didn't just happen. Its adoption required huge sums of money, both from private investors and from ports that aspired to be on the leading edge of a new technology. It required years of high-stakes bargaining with two of the titans of organized labor, Harry Bridges and Teddy Gleason, as well as delicate negotiations on standards that made it possible for almost any container to travel on any truck or train or ship. Ultimately, it took McLean's success in supplying U.S. forces in Vietnam to persuade the world of the container's potential.
Drawing on previously neglected sources, economist Marc Levinson shows how the container transformed economic geography, devastating traditional ports such as New York and London and fueling the growth of previously obscure ones, such as Oakland. By making shipping so cheap that industry could locate factories far from its customers, the container paved the way for Asia to become the world's workshop and brought consumers a previously unimaginable variety of low-cost products from around the globe.

Many thanks to the publisher for my ARC of the second edition

My Review: Technological disruptors play an immense role in human history. None more so than the humble shipping container, the subject of this four-hundred-page study by Economist and Author Levin. What began, I gather, as an interest in the life of Malcom McLean (no, I didn't misspell "Malcolm"), whose 1956 shipment of twenty-eight containers of his own design onto ships also modified to his design, to Houston, Texas, began the era of rapid globalization, turned into an economist's dream: a chance to study the economic and social and political impact of a disruptive technology before its fiftieth year of existence arrived. (2021 NOTE we are now in the sixty-fifth year of the container revolution, and even the pandemic can't stop the trains, ships, and trucks from rolling.)

It will surprise few that McLean's efforts to bring the container-shipping revolution to the world were opposed by the vested interests of the day, from the Interstate Commerce Commission to the International Longshoremen's Association. These behemoths, unstoppable and uncontrollable at the time, did their damnedest to impede, derail (!), and alter the disruptor into a new, toothless, challengeless arm of the status quo:
On domestic routes, government policy discouraged competition among ship lines. On international routes, rates for every commodity were fixed by conferences, a polite term for cartels, and the most important cargo, military freight, was handed out among U.S.-flag carriers without the nuisance of competitive bidding. Decisions about buying, building, or selling ships, about leasing terminals, and about sailing new routes all depended upon government directives.

So the bosses, the workers, and the government weren't on board with this containerization idea...but guess who was?

The United States Armed Forces.

As longshoremen collectively rolled over after an initial three-year contract negotiated in 1959, it was a signal of doom for The Labor Movement in US politics. The Armed Forces needed huge amounts of stuff, all kinds of stuff, in unprecedented mountains. And unlike World War II, there weren't strong backs everywhere glad to do it. But containers? Now, these babies would damned near do all the work that men used to do, and for a highly recoverable investment. SeaLand, as Malcom McLean had renamed his trucking outfit metastasized into a shipping conglomerate, stepped up to do the job. Cheaply, safely, efficiently.

That's a really exciting chapter in shipping history...followed by the urpsome evil profiteering regime we see today, unregulated shippers and deregulated producers of the poisons we're told we need to exist (and sadly enough, they're correct often enough to make re-regulation into a donnybrook the environment isn't likely to win). This is where reading Economist Levinson's American triumphalism become less pleasurable. While I wasn't old enough to fight in Vietnam, I was old enough to know I didn't like eating my dinner with Uncle Walter (Cronkite, for the younger crowd) intoning the number of dead boys rotting in a place I knew nothing much about and cared less for. The fact that they ate US-grown food and shot US-made bullets at an unprecedented rate was transparent to me then, and the subsequent use of that fact as a stick to bludgeon ever-more-pusillanimous "regulators" into loosening what protections are left for labor is illness-making.

As one would expect from a former editor of The Economist magazine, Author Levinson doesn't dawdle among the stylistic stargazer lilies. Also as one would expect from a book written by an economist, there are tables, equations, maps and graphs...all the accoutrements of learnèd academical case-making. But, and this is a key realization to learn, the author's sentences (while tending towards the sesquipedalian) are limpidly clear. He is tendentious, but not tedious, and this is a rare, delightful conjunction of traits.

Among this book's most merited accolades, according to his publisher's page for this title:
Winner of the 2007 Anderson Medal, Society for Nautical Research
Winner of the 2007 Bronze Medal in Finance/Investment/Economics, Independent Publisher Book Awards
Shortlisted for the 2006 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year
Honorable Mention for the 2006 John Lyman Book Award, Science and Technology category, North American Society for Ocean History
One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Business Books of 2013 (chosen by guest critic Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft)

WHAT THERE IS TO SAY WE HAVE SAID, a long, lively friendship in letters



WHAT THERE IS TO SAY WE HAVE SAID: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell
Suzanne Marrs, ed.

Mariner Books non-affiliate Amazon link
$12.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For over fifty years, Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, two of our most admired writers, penned letters to each other. They shared their worries about work and family, literary opinions and scuttlebutt, moments of despair and hilarity. Living half a continent apart, their friendship was nourished and maintained by their correspondence.

What There Is to Say We Have Said bears witness to Welty and Maxwell’s editorial relationships—both in his capacity as New Yorker editor and in their collegial back-andforth on their work. It’s also a chronicle of the literary world of the time; read talk of James Thurber, William Shawn, Katherine Anne Porter, J. D. Salinger, Isak Dinesen, William Faulkner, John Updike, Virginia Woolf, Walker Percy, Ford Madox Ford, John Cheever, and many more. It is a treasure trove of reading recommendations.

Here, Suzanne Marrs—Welty’s biographer and friend—offers an unprecedented window into two intertwined lives. Through careful collection of more than 300 letters as well as her own insightful introductions, she has created a record of a remarkable friendship and a lyrical homage to the forgotten art of letter writing.

My Review: You already know who Eudora Welty is or you wouldn't've clicked on the review. I assume most of my readers know who William Maxwell is as well, since his fame hasn't precisely been shrinking. You'll realize, since the correspondents are monadnocks of American literature, that this book was a Must-Have-or-Expire purchase. Lucky me, I had then (2011) a lovely man in my life who knew me well and gifted the book to me.

No one who loved the mid-century American literary scene could've known the deep and abiding affection Welty, a nominally single woman, and Maxwell, a thoroughly married man, carried for each other. In that time, perhaps even more than this one, men and women were not friends unless there were benefits, in the public's mind at least. The fact that Maxwell was The New Yorker editor whose staunch championing of Welty's work would've added to the cynical public's certainty that there must've been somethin' goin' on. Nothing could've been further from the truth: Maxwell, in a letter to Welty, says he stopped reading a letter in a famous couple's correspondence because it contained an intimate endearment as a salutation!

Not the sort of man to sexually harass his woman friend.

But think of the work these two giants did, together...his editorial eye made her work much better, as she readily acknowledged; he felt her talent was matchless and merely benefited from burnishing...and in their own rights. I can insert a list of delicious works by both, a long, long list, for you to romp through, but those things are never complete even when both authors are dead. My tastes have changed, your tastes aren't necessarily much like mine. Suffice it to say, for today, you should go read my reviews of So Long, See You Tomorrow among Maxwell's ouevre, and One Writer's Beginnings among Welty's. They're not even small samples, it's true, but there are reasons to read these two revealing, personal narratives in conjunction with this collection of letters.

The course of a long friendship contains many bends and twists. Marrs doesn't comment extensively on Welty's seeming reticence about her long-time lover, married man Kenneth Millar, beyond noting it; I expect it was starchy Maxwell destroying "compromising" things if it existed at all. In honesty, I expect it was more likely the result of a natural reticence, a reserve, that these immensely and intensely creative people maintained in their ordinary lives. What isn't said can't be regretted with anything like the bitterness of blurting too much. A surprise to me was the long breaks between the mention of one or another's creative projects' progress. I was half-expecting a white-hot exchange of intensely felt writerly frustrations! Instead, it's the quotidian...what Mother did, what Brookie said...that they reserved for each other's eyes. It is far more intimate than mere sex. It is Love.

That is the shocking truth of this book. These two people loved each other. They cared deeply about each other, knew the foibles and failings each self-reproached, and supported supported supported until the shadows passed. Can there be a more perfect way to have a friend? A more fortunate discovery than this kind of friend?

I can't excerpt enough from any letter to make you feel the deep and abiding caring each carried for the other. I can tell you that the collection's title, which seems a bit overstated and awkward on first reading, is the only possible title for the work. It is verbatim from a letter, late in the writers' lives, sent by Maxwell to Welty. She has apologized for her long-delayed response to him. He says, "Dearest Eudora, what there is to say we have said, in one way or another.”

If ever in your life you have a friend to whom you can say, or write such a thing, or from whom you can expect it, you are a lucky person indeed.

Author Marrs has also written Eudora Welty: A Biography, which I possess but have not yet read...after all, I need a retirement project as much as people who work do!...and fully expect to enjoy as much as I did this delightful work.

THE MOST PERFECT THING, how life begins in fragile containers



THE MOST PERFECT THING
TIM BIRKHEAD

Bloomsbury USA
$27 hardcover, available now

Rating:

The Publisher Says: Renowned ornithologist Tim Birkhead opens this gripping story as a female guillemot chick hatches, already carrying her full quota of tiny eggs within her undeveloped ovary. As she grows into adulthood, only a few of her eggs mature, are released into the oviduct, and are fertilized by sperm stored from copulation that took place days or weeks earlier. Within a matter of hours, the fragile yolk is surrounded by albumen and the whole is gradually encased within a turquoise jewel of a shell. Soon afterward the fully formed egg is expelled onto a bare rocky ledge, where it will be incubated for four weeks before another chick emerges and the life cycle begins again.

The Most Perfect Thing is about how eggs in general are made, fertilized, developed, and hatched. The eggs of most birds spend just 24 hours in the oviduct; however, that journey takes 48 hours in cuckoos, which surreptitiously lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. From the earliest times, the study of birds' ovaries and ova (eggs) played a vital role in the quest to unravel the mysteries of fertilization and embryo development in humans. Birkhead uses birds' eggs as wondrous portals into natural history, enlivened by the stories of naturalists and scientists, including Birkhead and his students, whose discoveries have advanced current scientific knowledge of reproduction.

My Review:

THE OPTIMISTIC ENVIRONMENTALIST, a welcome positive message in a world of depressing facts



THE OPTIMISTIC ENVIRONMENTALIST: Progressing Towards a Greener Future
DAVID R. BOYD

ECW Press
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating:

The Publisher Says: Yes, the world faces substantial environmental challenges — climate change, pollution, and extinction. But the surprisingly good news is that we have solutions to these problems. In the past 50 years, a remarkable number of environmental problems have been solved, while substantial progress is ongoing on others.

The Optimistic Environmentalist chronicles these remarkable success stories. Endangered species — from bald eagles to gray whales — pulled back from the precipice of extinction. Thousands of new parks, protecting billions of hectares of land and water. The salvation of the ozone layer, vital to life on Earth. The exponential growth of renewable energy powered by wind, water, and sun. The race to be the greenest city in the world. Remarkable strides in cleaning up the air we breathe and the water we drink. The banning of dozens of the world’s most toxic chemicals. A circular economy where waste is a thing of the past. Past successes pave the way for even greater achievements in the future.

Providing a powerful antidote to environmental despair, this book inspires optimism, leading readers to take action and exemplifying how change can happen.

My Review:

Thursday, April 27, 2017

New glasses ordered! Next the goofy meds might need adjusting



Yeup, I needed a new Rx for glasses alright. I'm also now taking Ocuvite twice a day up from once. Will now discuss adjusting the anxiety meds upward as well. These bloody migraines have got to stop.

Thursday, April 20, 2017

Well, April has pretty much rotted on ice for me


I've been having migraines for the past few weeks. This is the first time since 2012 I've had the pain part...mostly I just get eyegraines, with the trippy Egyptian/Art Deco/Paisley hallucinations. I kinda sorta enjoy those, at least they keep me entertained.

These suckers, while mild by migraine standards (I know people whose suffering with the migraine events in their lives make me weep in sympathy), are stinkin' miserable and make me want to do socially unacceptable things to my TV-watching neighbors and roommate. With headphones on, eyes behind sleep mask, and endless rain sounds at a precisely tuned volume, I get through the 2-3 hours they last. Then sleep.

All of this is bad for reading and worse for reviewing. To the writers and publishers to whom I've promised reviews, they will happen, though timing is going to be off. I apologize all over myself, I regret any miffed feelings my brain's treason is causing (if any), but regularly scheduled curmudgeonliness will resume the instant I can get a handle on what brought this wretched plague back.

My next visit to the eye guy for a prescription check-up, eliminating the possibility that it's just horrific eyestrain (it's not, but I'm thorough), was moved to April 28th. Glaucoma? Some other eye disease? Elimination round begins then.

Think kind, soft, TV-less thoughts at me, please.

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Taking a short hiatus

Hello my friends! I've been suffering from eyestrain. I need a new prescription and glasses, so until that happens I'm not able to read without headaches. I will be back in service ASAP.

Saturday, April 8, 2017

THE QUEST, fourth Ancient Egyptian novel, goes over the top



THE QUEST
WILBUR SMITH
(Ancient Egyptian #4)
St Martin's Press
$9.99 mass market, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Wilbur Smith has earned international acclaim for his bestselling River God, The Seventh Scroll, and Warlock. Now, the unrivaled master of adventure returns with the eagerly awaited sequel to his thrilling Egyptian series with his most fantastic story yet. The Quest continues the story of the Warlock, Taita, wise in the lore of the gods and a master of magic and the supernatural.

Egypt has been struck by a series of terrible plagues, killing its crops and crippling its people. Then the ultimate disaster befalls the kingdom. The Nile fails. The waters that nourish and sustain the land dry up.
Something catastrophic is taking place in the distant and totally unexplored depths of Africa, from where the mighty river springs. In desperation the Pharaoh sends Taita, the only man who might be able to find his way through the hazardous territory to the source of the Nile and discover the cause of all their woes. But not even Taita can have any idea of what a terrible enemy waits in ambush in those dark lands at the end of their world.

No other author can conjure up the violence and mystery of Ancient Egypt like Wilbur Smith. The Quest marks his stirring return to the acclaimed series and proves once again why fans such as Stephen King praise him as the world's "best historical novelist."

My Review: Okay. I started the series with an historical novel, shifted into overdrive as a fantasy element came to the fore in Warlock, and now we're in full-blown fantasy mode. The story isn't remotely believable as history, but it's s a good deal of fun.

What's disturbing to me is the squicky sexual politics. A eunuch is de-eunuched supernaturally to make the beast with two backs with a (young) reincarnated version of his long-dead love. I'm not sure that makes me all warm and fuzzy about love spanning the ages or really, really uncomfortable with old men sexing up little girls. Well, okay, she's not an actual little girl. But something just doesn't sit right with me. I don't know exactly what it is, in that the author isn't in any way making this prurient and sexual but is presenting it as lovers separated by death being reunited. I am not, however, comfortable with it, and it significantly clouded my enjoyment of the exciting, adventurous, and action-packed Wilbur Smith novel surrounding it.

The goddess battle was, I'm sorry to say, not a worthy end to the build-up we got. It was almost an afterthought, and it should have been a centerpiece. On balance, the Smith novel aspects are redeeming only to a middling extent. The pages turned, they will for all Smith readers, but the essential backing of history's known Egypt wasn't quite enough on this outing.

SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW: one of the most poignant novella titles I've ever read


SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW
WILLIAM MAXWELL

Vintage International
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers—one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy—has been shattered.

Fifty years later, one of those boys—now a grown man—tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who had the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.

My Review: What a beautiful but sad book.
What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
So speaks out narrator as he sets out to recreate the end of his childhood. The last gasping breath of an unhappy lad's, I think innocence is too light-hearted a term for it, ignorance of the full measure of unhappiness that others can bear in addition to himself, even if he waits a half-century to get to the meat of the pain:
Whether they are part of a home or home is a part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen–the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washing day, of wool drying in the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops.

His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-back copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too, while you are at it.

Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn too–the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.
"Cletus" brought to life as an Einsteinian thought experiment, a boy whose remembered existence is defined by a murder committed or a suicide perpetrated or both. Or neither?

But let me say this. My confusion about this issue is paralleled by the narrator's confusion about his own place, his very existence in the world of this little prairie farming town. His father isn't much for feelings, and he's a "sissy" and an artistic child...except for music, the art form his father loves and he knowingly resists learning as his only somewhat outward act of rebellion.
As he turned away I had the feeling he had washed his hands of me. Was I not the kind of little boy he wanted to have?
What strikes me as hilarious, in a not-funny-at-all way, is:
We were both creatures of the period. I doubt if the heavy-businessman-father-and-the-oversensitive-artistic-son syndrome exists anymore. Fathers have grown sensitive and kiss their grown sons when they feel like it, and who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.
Well now, this novella having a publication date of 1980, all I can think is that Maxwell intended this as sly humor. Or else he was deaf and blind.

Sly humor it is.

And it's of a piece with the Maxwellian phrases that abound in this book. It's always so tempting to rush to the Goodreads quotes page and add...almost every line he writes. Retyping the entire book being, then, a real temptation, I add no quotes to the ones already found there. I rely on the mathematical certainty that all of us together are smarter than any one of us individually. Let the hive mind decide which of these sentences are crucial, which best illuminate Maxwell's writerly chops as well as his storyteller's acumen.

But the title of this review gives me away. I want to add something to the quotes page. I can't, though, because even I the "oh-so-what-about-spoilers" King-Emperor feel the last two pages of the story can't be excerpted without making the point of reading the book evaporate.

It is damned near heartbreaking, what those pages say and what it means. I was perfectly glad to read this book, and rate it close to four stars. Then the ending hit me with Negan's baseball bat.

Maxwell wrote a good little story and a perfect ending. That deserves recognition. Read it, please, it won't take long and it will give you something beautiful in return.

Wednesday, April 5, 2017

BP BLOWOUT, a thorough analysis of the most expensive corporate-caused disaster in history



BP BLOWOUT: Inside the Gulf Oil Disaster
DANIEL JACOBS

Brookings Institution Press
$23.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: BP Blowout is the first comprehensive account of the legal, economic, and environmental consequences of the disaster that resulted from the April 2010 blowout at a BP well in the Gulf of Mexico. The accident, which destroyed the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, killed 11 people. The ensuing oil discharge—the largest ever in U.S. waters—polluted much of the Gulf for months, wreaking havoc on its inhabitants and the environment.

A management professor and former award-winning Justice Department lawyer responsible for enforcing environmental laws, Daniel Jacobs tells the story that neither BP nor the federal government wants heard: how the company and the government fell short, both in terms of preventing and responding to the disaster.

Critical details about the cause and aftermath of the disaster have emerged through court proceedings and with time. The key finding of the federal judge who presided over the civil litigation was that the blowout resulted from BP’s gross negligence.

BP has paid tens of billions of dollars to settle claims and lawsuits. The company also has pled guilty to manslaughter in a separate criminal case, but no one responsible for the tragedy is going to prison.

BP Blowout provides new and disturbing details in a definitive narrative that takes the reader inside BP, the White House, Congress and the courthouse. This is an important book for readers interested in the environment, sustainability, public policy, leadership, and risk management.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: At the very beginning of this infuriating book, the author makes this statement:
The federal government brought criminal charges against BP and four of its employees. The company pled guilty to manslaughter and other charges to resolve the criminal case, agreeing to pay a record $4 billion in fines and penalties. Two BP employees were acquitted, and two pled guilty to misdemeanors. No one will go to prison for the accident. In stark contrast, the federal government prosecuted hundreds of individuals for filing false claims against BP. Seventy-five were incarcerated.
And this was under the late, lamented Obama administration. Can you even imagine what would happen if this were to happen under the current kakistocracy? The peons would be out polishing BP's tankers, chanting how sorry they were for the trouble their childrens' deaths were causing the corporation, the US Army guarding them with live ammunition in their guns.

The book is a good case study, at a high level, for what lies at the root of the epic disaster that has spawned a CGI-fest of a film, though few other tangible results outside the Gulf Coast. The disaster is, in hindsight, apparent from the get-go. BP filed the paperwork to gain drilling rights to this piece of the Gulf of Mexico that was, shall we say, slipshod:
On March 19, 2008, BP purchased from the federal government for $34 million the lease rights to a nine-square-mile area off the coast of Louisiana anomalously named the Mississippi Canyon. After making the purchase, BP went through the process of submitting to federal regulators the necessary plans to obtain permission to drill a well in the area.

BP's lengthy Initial Exploration Plan (EP) for the Macondo well was submitted in February 2009. In the section entitled "Blowout Scenario," BP wrote that "a scenario for a potential blowout of the well from which BP would expect to have the highest volume of liquid hydrocarbons is not required for the operations proposed in this EP." In other words, the worst case scenario question was not applicable.

BP also submitted an Oil Spill Response Plan. It described the various species of wildlife that supposedly could be affected by an accident in the Gulf. In an indication that the Macondo plan was a cookie-cutter extract from another plan, some of the species identified in it (such as sea lions, sea otters, and walruses) exist not in the Gulf's warm waters but in frigid Alaskan waters. ... William Reilly, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency at the time of the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident and later co-chair of the Presidential Commission investigating the BP disaster, said that he was "shocked" that BP was not better prepared than Exxon had been more than two decades earlier.
Sea lions in the Gulf. Man, I must have worse vision than I thought, living down there and going to the beach all those years and never so much as catching sight of one. So clearly we're not talking about a regulatory agency with much interest in the paperwork that's submitted to it. Not even the most cursory glance could possibly have been given to this farrago and had it pass muster.

And yet it did pass, like intestinal gas, and it's symptomatic of a far nastier problem that was fixing to blow. BP has a long history of taking the easiest way to get to its profits. It has been fined many times for careless operations resulting in human and environmental problems. Nothing, however, has yet been seen to equal the explosion and subsequent sinking of the Deepwater Horizon. The event itself is largely offstage for most of the book, forming the backdrop for the author's primary focus: and then what happened? The answer is, for all that it's contained in under 200 pages, admirably complete. Author Jacobs is in his element when relating the details of the disaster to the people and places they describe:
The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health, is conducting the GuLF Study, the largest ever study of the potential health effects associated with exposure to oil. The study plans to follow more than 30,000 members of the affected communities (cleanup workers and local residents) for ten years.
Preliminary results, reported in 2014, revealed that cleanup workers were 30 percent more likely to suffer from depression or anxiety. Results reported in 2015 showed that the incidence of wheezing and coughing in cleanup workers was 20-30 percent higher than normal.
After noting the clarity of Author Jacobs' presentation of the facts, I'll note their worrisome content and fret over the likelihood of the current administration's having cut or eliminated the funding for this study and its eventual report. The data would, I have little doubt, be very useful to the anti-oil lobby and will most likely be sent to live with the three-eyed, five-finned fishes around Macondo.

An issue that arises in almost every debate I've ever had with right-wing radicals is the stupidity of charging corporations with other-than-civil-law crimes. A corporation isn't a person, I've trapped a few into saying; if that's so, I counter, why does the law treat the corporation as a person? And after a horrible event like the Macondo well blowout that was primarily caused by the careless actions and reckless inactions of BP, can the fact of criminal culpability really not be considered and assigned?
What purpose is served by pursuing a corporation criminally instead of civilly when the primary sanction to be imposed in either case is a monetary penalty? The company itself cannot be sent to prison, and its directors, officers, and employees cannot be punished for the company's own ctiminal acrs. ... Reasonable minds differ on the question, with some legal scholars taking the view that the criminal justice process is wasted on corporations when civil sanctions are available. Although the concept of double jeopardy does not bar the government from seeking both criminal and civil penalties for the same transgression, arguably there is some overkill in its doing so.

In BP's case, however, there was very little overlap between the criminal offenses and the civil violations. Of the criminal charges brought against BP, the only negligent discharge count also constitutes a civil violation under the Clean Water Act. Moreover, when a company is responsible for such a huge calamity as the BP disaster, arguably it should be subject to both civil and criminal enforcement actions.
The nightmare that millions of people will continue to endure, in the form of a radically degraded environment that most likely will continue to suffer consequences of BP's bad business practices, seems to me to call for assignment of criminal culpability. Luckily, the courts agreed; also luckily, BP itself realized it was in new territory here and pled guilty to and/or settled almost all the suits brought against it.

This was not cheap, and it will continue to be not cheap for quite some years to come:
The nation's worst offshore oil discharge has resulted in what appears to be the world's most expensive manmade corporate disaster. At $61.1 billion, BP's estimate of its total costs broke all known records.

Significantly, the taxpayer bears all the risks of any unknown natural resource damage costs that exceed [a court mandated] $700 million cap. Depending on those potential costs—as well as how other societal costs are valued—all told the cost of the disaster might wind up growing substantially.

No matter how one values the costs of the BP disaster, they were enormous. Enormous for the company, its shareholders, the American taxpayer, and society as a whole. BP may have all but closed its books on the disaster, but the taxpayer and society may be left holding the bag.
BP's share price took a big hit after the Macondo disaster. The company used accounting chicanery to disguise the fact that, as a whole, it has yet to break a sweat paying the bills from their collective wrongdoing. They're profitable in spite of a lower market valuation. They're still drilling in US waters, in fact. Earning money from robbing the same nest they've already epically fouled. So their shareholders, from state pension funds down to index-fund shareholders, aren't in danger of losing real as opposed to fantasy money. That hasn't stopped a plethora of shareholder lawsuits from being filed. Some well-intentioned, suing to prevent the corporation from abusing the value of their shares by taking stupid risks, down to stupid stuff meant to be just annoying enough to get the suing parties a go-away payoff.

Ain't greed grand.

Author Jacobs advocates for a retreat from that kind of shareholding, described as shareholder-value management. The central presumption of this system is that managers have an affirmative legal duty to place the maintenance of shareholder value above any and all other concerns insofar as no laws are broken. There's a wink in there. No *important* laws, meanong ones that anyone can enforce expensively to the company's detriment. He cites a distinguished Cornell law professor, Lynn Stout, who claims that's a self-serving myth, "[c]hasing shareholder value is a managerial choice, not a legal requirement." Author Jacobs continues:
[Stout] maintains that BP shareholders do not necessarily want to raise share value to the exclusion of any other interest. "Real human beings own BP's shares, either directly or indirectly through pension and mutual funds, and real human beings care about much more than jusr whether BP stock rises."

A more enlightened current view of a corporation's purpose is known as the stakeholder theory. It teaches that a corporation owes a duty not just to its shareholders but to all of its stakeholders. These stakeholders include its business partners, customers, employees, and communities, among others. ...[M]any of BP's stakeholders were adversely affected by the BP blowout. They included BP's shareholders, whose stock plummeted. [The CEO]'s focus on being [primarily] an "operating company" backfired from any perspective.
The operating company that was supposed to save value for the shareholders by cutting corners has, with this disaster, received its death blow in my opinion. The current U-turn in social thinking will, I am confident, be short-lived. Too many people understand what it means and oppose its efforts.

Chapter 12, "Have We Learned or Only Failed?", is probably the most iportant part of the book. The question as phrased contains a big clue to the author's apparent purpose in writing this careful, complete overview of the Deepwater Horizon's death while drilling the Macondo well: Is past prologue, as it almost always is? "It depends," says Author Jacobs. It always depends. This book came out mere weeks before the 2016 election. The somewhat dubious tone of chapter 12 might have turned apocalyptic had it been published even a month later. The quoted paperwork above, filed by BP in pursuit of profits from the Macondo well, might be appalling but the agencies now in charge of licensing and inspecting oil drilling are not going to get larger or better funded now. The past is prologue. This time even the preface hasn't changed. It will most likely get worse before it gets better.

Sleep well.