Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Cloths on your Back, Gas in your Car, and Food on your Plate. New York: Picador, 2014. ISBN: 9781250058294.
After the introduction, the book is arranged into 11 chapters, notes, and further reading.
The book not only looks at shipping. It also looks at various issues and concerns about and around the shipping industry. Some of the additional topics include harbors, whales, piracy, merchant marine history, and missionaries. It also discusses issues in the industry. Shipping is not always an honest and transparent industry. Like many industries, it is highly exploitative, and it does all sorts of seriously shady things such as flags of convenience, ports of registration convenience, shady ownerships, and wage theft. It is not a glamorous trade. These sailors are often unappreciated, exploited, taken advantage of, and lacking recourse or remedies when they suffer or get screwed by their employers. Yet without them the world economies would grind to a halt.
The narrative is interesting, but it can be a bit inconsistent. Some of the ancillary topics can feel more like a digression. The chapter on the Second World War and the merchant marines, for example, could make you forget what the book's main topic was. It was a bit too long; the topic is one for full book treatment. Some topics are more interesting than others, so reader engagement can vary.
The book is very well documented with plenty of notes. The author strives to get as many sides and parties represented in the book as possible. From ship crews to company representatives to maritime organizations, the author talked to people, researched, and brought it all together. We get an unflinching look at an essential industry that many take for granted and few appreciate.
Overall I liked the book. For readers interested in business, maritime commerce, logistics, and labor topics, this is a good option. For students here at our college doing business and logistics topics, this book may be a good option both for the text and the sources it cites. Do note the book was written before the COVID-19 pandemic when supply chain issues were rampant. If anything, this book shows the supply chain had plenty of issues back then. At times one wonders how it all manages to stay afloat and function. Not all of the industry is awful, but much of it is, and there is little incentive to make it better.
3 out of 5 stars.
On a final note, for reader advisors, this book may have similar appeal to other books in the "person goes and does a stunt of some kind for a certain amount of time" genre. Other examples of this genre, that I have read, include but are not limited to the following. Links to go my reviews:
- The Year of Living Biblically.
- Fried Twinkies, Buckle Bunnies, and Bull Riders.
- Sleeping Around in America.
Additional reading notes:
The author is allowed to sail on a Maersk ship:
"I find Maersk fascinating. It is the Coca-Cola of freight with none of the fame. Its parent company A.P. Møller-Maersk is Denmark's largest company, its sales equal to 20 percent of Denmark's GDP; its ships use more oil than the entire nation" (6).
Maersk is a global corporation. In addition to shipping and freight, they look for and drill for oil in various parts of the world. In Denmark they own supermarkets and banks.
On the crews and their ships:
"The benefits of flagging out vary according to registry, but there will always be lower taxes, more lenient labor laws, no requirement to pay expensive American or British crews who are protected by unions and legislation. Now the citizens of rich countries own ships-- Greece has the most, then Japan and Germany-- but they are sailed by the cheap labor of Filipinos, Bangladeshis, Chinese, Indonesians. They are the ones who clean your cruise cabin and work in the engine room, who bring your gas, your soybeans, your perfumes and medicines" (9).
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