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 MOST PERFECT THING, how life begins in fragile containers

THE MOST PERFECT THING
TIM BIRKHEAD
Bloomsbury USA (non-affiliate Amazon link
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

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: I thought "guillemot" was a Dr. Seuss name before I read this book. Author Birkhead disabused me of this with his praises sung for the aesthetics of their shells:
I mean pretty enough, but this guy's obsessed....

And eggs are perfect in so many different ways. They have to be, for birds lay and incubate in such incredible diversity of habitats and situations, from the poles to the tropics; in wet, dry, clean and microbe-infested conditions; in nests and without nests; warmed by body heat and without body heat. The shape, colour and size of eggs as well as the composition of their yolk and albumen all constitute the most extraordinary set of adaptations. The fact that birds' eggs also provided biologists with their first insights into human reproduction makes their story even more momentous.

He is not overselling the burden of his refrain. This is a fascinating look at what these dinosaur revenants do in the reproductive world (I got a new insult out of the read: I told one person I detest that she was an altricial birth to a precocial species) and what that has revealed to scientists in applicability to all others.

People's love of the beauty of eggs has led to some dark consequences. Egg collectors hunted their favorites to actual or functional extinction, inspiring the UK to pass pretty draconian laws against private ownership of the things...in 1954! Even *I* wasn't born then, and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was still a love-offering in progress!

What you need to know most is: was it fun to read? I'll say yes, because I really like science and am not afraid of the dictionary. If you're not a science nut, maybe it won't delight you; maybe you'll have to look stuff up; and maybe that won't agree with you.

It agreed with me.

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 (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, 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 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: 4* of five

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.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME THIS ARC. THANK YOU.

My Review: Nine years on, this book hits different. We've just been through a truly horrifying US election, won by the lowest scum ever to win the world's most powerful political office; we can expect bad trouble to follow, on many fronts, soon.

That is going to require clear thinking and focused action. In its turn, that will require us to know where we are. The author presents his facts and draws very positive conclusions based on them.

No one can protect something they do not know the value, and the extent of. Learn! Don't despair...learn, and grown hardened to the messages of nihilism and misery and *shudder* change.

Protect our planet or we all go down together.

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.

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.