The Outlaw Sea: Chaos and Crime on the World's Oceans

by WilliamLangewiesche (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $3.29

  Three quarters of the world is made up of ocean; vast, untamed expanses of water, impossible to police rigorously. For travellers by sea there is an ever-present danger of shipwreck, the age-old problem of piracy, and now an alarming new threat of terrorism. Forty-three thousand gargantuan ships navigate their way across the oceans, carrying nearly all the raw material and products on which our lives depend. Out at sea, ships become tiny islands, with their own distinct and isolated rules. Many are owned or managed by companies so ghostly that they only exist on paper. William Langewiesche vividly reports on the unforgiving and brutal forces to which those who take to the sea are exposed. He explores both the murky politics of the world's oceans and brings us gripping, often tragic, human stories from the sea. Taking in an extraordinary event of sophisticated piracy in the Malacca Straight, reporting on the appalling conditions of India's shipbreaking trade, and giving a gripping minute by minute account of the sinking of the Estonia passenger ferry in 1994, The Outlaw Sea by turns enthralls and terrifies.

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.29

  The open ocean--that vast expanse of international waters--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. But its efficiencies are accompanied by global problems--shipwrecks and pollution, the hard lives and deaths of the crews of the gargantuan ships, and the growth of two 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 that Langewiesche brings startlingly into view. The ocean is our world, he reminds us, and it is wild.

• New

  Paperback
  2005

  $18.43

  The open ocean--that vast expanse of international waters--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. But its efficiencies are accompanied by global problems--shipwrecks and pollution, the hard lives and deaths of the crews of the gargantuan ships, and the growth of two 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 that Langewiesche brings startlingly into view. The ocean is our world, he reminds us, and it is wild.