News Release:

A Classic Returns to the Bestseller Lists

More than 20 years after it was published, Jean Sasson's PRINCESS: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia is a NYT bestseller again. 

PRINCESS laid bare life in the Saudi royal family as Princess Sultana knew it. Her story of incomparable luxury paid for with the sacrifice of all personal freedom caused a sensation when it was first published in 1992, by William Morrow in the United States and by Transworld in the UK.  It was sold in 38 countries and became a worldwide bestseller, including a stint of eleven weeks on the New York Times list, rising to No. 3.  Before PRINCESS, few people knew the truth of life for women in Saudi Arabia.  To discover how young girls could be married to men three times their age, and how women were not allowed to work or travel without a male guardian's express permission, was a revelation for readers.

In anticipation of the twentieth anniversary, Jean Sasson and Princess Sultana updated the story.  Sasson and her literary agent, Liza Dawson of Liza Dawson Associates, then commissioned new art work for all three books in the PRINCESS trilogy, which is now published by Windsor-Brooke Books and distributed by Midpoint.
 
After a recent blast announcing a promotion, and with the help of both Amazon and Barnes & Noble, the book surged in sales.  PRINCESS was No. 1 on this week's Wall Street Journal e-book bestseller list.  It was No. 17 on the USA Today list.   And next week it will appear at No. 2 on The New York Times e-list and No. 3 on The New York Times combined e- and print editions. 
 
"There was obviously a pent-up demand for PRINCESS," says Dawson.  "PRINCESS is a timeless classic.  It is required reading in colleges and high schools.  Teachers say it is the book to turn to for authentic detail about the lives of women who live beneath the veil.  And unfortunately little has changed in Saudi Arabia, which means that the book is just as current as it was twenty years ago."

Sasson and Princess Sultana are currently working on a new book in the PRINCESS series which has been licensed to her UK Publisher Transworld.  
 
Sasson is also the author of  THE RAPE OF KUWAIT: The True Story of Iraqi Atrocities Against a Civilian Population;   MAYADA:  Daughter of Iraq;  LOVE IN A TORN LAND:  The True Story of a Freedom Fighter's Escape from Iraqi Vengeance;  FOR THE LOVE OF A

SON: One Afghan Woman's Quest for her Stolen Son;  GROWING UP BIN LADEN: Osama Bin Laden's Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World and her e-only memoir AMERICAN CHICK IN SAUDI ARABIA. 
 
"It's particularly exciting to read the dozens of reviews on Barnes and Noble and on Amazon from new readers,” says Dawson.  “Sasson is an author who has an on-going career in print and a strong digital backlist.  Both formats support each other and have brought her back to bestsellerdom."

 
 
 
PRAISE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER PRINCESS:

"Absolutely riveting and profoundly sad" --People magazine

"A chilling story...a vivid account of an air-conditioned nightmare" --Entertainment Weekly

"Must-reading for anyone interested in human rights" --USA Today

"Shocking...candid...sad, sobering, and compassionate" --San Francisco Chronicle

On My Radar:

Foul Play: The Dark Arts of Cheating in Sport
by Mike Rowbottom
A & C Black Publishers, Ltd. / Bloomsbury

Trade paperback

From the publisher website:

Foul Play dissects the age-old subject of cheating in all its absurdity. From plain old doping to claiming a marathon victory despite having driven the middle section of the race, from match-fixing to diving for a penalty - cheating in sport is as old as sport itself. 

There are plenty of well-known cases of cheats being found out in sport: Ben Johnson, for example, was stripped of his 100m Olympic medal after a positive drugs test; South African cricketer Hansie Cronje was banned from all cricket for life after admitting involvement in match-rigging; rugby union recently found itself having to deal with the "bloodgate" scandal. However, there are myriad other examples of bending the rules more subtly: pressuring the referee, demoralising an opponent with mind games, or shirt-pulling.

But what constititues cheating and where do we draw the line? Are some sports cleaner than others? Is cheating in one sport the same as cheating in another or does each sport's distinctive culture set different standards? Is there such a thing as a sport without sin? Or, indeed, a sporting competitor?

This book is not a catalogue of past sporting misdemeanours so much as an investigation into the lengths to which some sports people have gone, and will go, to get the better of others. And also the lengths to which they will not go.

On My Radar:

Who Stole the American Dream?
by Hedrick Smith
Random House
Trade paperback

From the publisher website:

Pulitzer Prize winner Hedrick Smith’s new book is an extraordinary achievement, an eye-opening account of how, over the past four decades, the American Dream has been dismantled and we became two Americas.  In his bestselling The Russians, Smith took millions of readers inside the Soviet Union. In The Power Game, he took us inside Washington’s corridors of power. Now Smith takes us across America to show how seismic changes, sparked by a sequence of landmark political and economic decisions, have transformed America. As only a veteran reporter can, Smith fits the puzzle together, starting with Lewis Powell’s provocative memo that triggered a political rebellion that dramatically altered the landscape of power from then until today.  This is a book full of surprises and revelations—the accidental beginnings of the 401(k) plan, with disastrous economic consequences for many; the major policy changes that began under Jimmy Carter; how the New Economy disrupted America’s engine of shared prosperity, the “virtuous circle” of growth, and how America lost the title of “Land of Opportunity.” Smith documents the transfer of $6 trillion in middle-class wealth from homeowners to banks even before the housing boom went bust, and how the U.S. policy tilt favoring the rich is stunting America’s economic growth. This book is essential reading for all of us who want to understand America today, or why average Americans are struggling to keep afloat. Smith reveals how pivotal laws and policies were altered while the public wasn’t looking, how Congress often ignores public opinion, why moderate politicians got shoved to the sidelines, and how Wall Street often wins politically by hiring over 1,400 former government officials as lobbyists. Smith talks to a wide range of people, telling the stories of Americans high and low. From political leaders such as Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and Martin Luther King, Jr., to CEOs such as Al Dunlap, Bob Galvin, and Andy Grove, to heartland Middle Americans such as airline mechanic Pat O’Neill, software systems manager Kristine Serrano, small businessman John Terboss, and subcontractor Eliseo Guardado, Smith puts a human face on how middle-class America and the American Dream have been undermined. This magnificent work of history and reportage is filled with the penetrating insights, provocative discoveries, and the great empathy of a master journalist. Finally, Smith offers ideas for restoring America’s great promise and reclaiming the American Dream.

A Book I Want to Read:

The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune
by Conor O'Clery
Public Affairs Books

Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Bill Clinton once said of the book's subject, "Chuck Feeney's success in business, coupled with his commitment to philanthropy, stands as living proof that it is possible to do well and do good at the same time." This authorized but not approved biography demonstrates how one of the world's richest and most secretive donors managed to do just that. More than a story of an extraordinarily gifted entrepreneur,The Billionaire Who Wasn't is the tale of what happens to a man confronted with wealth beyond imagining, and how he came to make the decision to get rid of almost all of it. The book now includes a section on the controversial last days of Feeney's foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies, and one final enormous pledge to build a cutting-edge, technology-focused university with Cornell-Technion in New York City.

Conor O'Clery is an award-winning journalist and author who served as foreign correspondent for The Irish Times in London, Moscow, Beijing, Washington, and New York. He has written books on Russian, Irish, and American politics. He now lives in Dublin, Ireland.

I reviewed a previous Conor O'Clery book here.

.

In My TBR Stack:

The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory
by Jesse Walker
Harper Books

Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Jesse Walker’s The United States of Paranoia presents a comprehensive history of conspiracy theories in American culture and politics, from the colonial era to the War on Terror. 

The fear of intrigue and subversion doesn’t exist only on the fringes of society, but has always been part of our national identity. When such tales takes hold, Walker argues, they reflect the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe them, even if they say nothing true about the objects of the theories themselves. 

With intensive research and a deadpan sense of humor, Jesse Walker’s The United States of Paranoia combines the rigor of real history with the punch of pulp fiction. 

This edition includes primary-source documentation in the form of archival photographs, cartoons, and film stills selected by the author. 

Book Description 

A history of America's demons 

1693: Cotton Mather suggests that the spirits attacking Salem are allied with the colony's human enemies. At their "Cheef Witch-meetings," he writes, "there has been present some French canadians, and some Indian Sagamores, to concert the methods of ruining New England." 

1835: A gunman tries to kill Andrew Jackson. The president accuses a senator of plotting the assassination. Jackson's critics counter that the shooting was arranged by the president himself to gain public support. 

1868: An article in the New-York Tribune declares that the Democrats have engineered malaria outbreaks in the nation's capital, pumping "the air, and the water, and the whisky of Washington full of poison." 

1967: President Lyndon Johnson asks his cabinet if the Communists are behind the country's urban riots. The attorney general tells him that the evidence isn't there, but Johnson isn't convinced. 

Conspiracy theories aren't just a feature of the fringe. They've been a potent force across the political spectrum, at the center as well as the extremes, from the colonial era to the present. In The United States of Paranoia, Jesse Walker explores this rich history, arguing that conspiracy stories should be read not just as claims to be either believed or debunked but also as folklore. When a tale takes hold, it reveals something true about the anxieties and experiences of those who believe and repeat it, even if the story says nothing true about the objects of the theory itself. 

In a story that stretches from the seventeenth century to today, Walker lays out five conspiracy narratives that recur in American politics and popular culture. With intensive research and a deadpan sense of humor, The United States of Paranoia combines the rigor of real history with the punch of pulp fiction.

Links

Six of the Craziest Conspiracy Theories from United States of Paranoia (Mother Jones)

Review of United States of Paranoia (Los Angeles Times)

Author Twitter feed

Excerpt from United States of Paranoia (salon.com)

On My Radar:

Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings
by Craig Brown
Simon & Schuster

Trade paperback

From the publisher website:

IMAGINE THESE UNLIKELY—BUT TRUE—ENCOUNTERS: 

Martha Graham and Madonna 

Igor Stravinsky and Walt Disney 

Frank Lloyd Wright and Marilyn Monroe 

Marilyn Monroe and Nikita Khrushchev 

President Richard M. Nixon and Elvis Presley 

Harpo Marx and George Bernard Shaw 

Salvador Dali and Sigmund Freud 

Groucho Marx and T. S. Eliot 

BRILLIANT IN CONCEPTION AND DIZZYING IN EXECUTION, Hello Goodbye Hello is a daisy chain of 101 fascinating true encounters, chance meetings, and disastrous collisions between the celebrated and the gifted, the famous and the infamous. Witty and wicked, Hello Goodbye Hello is the perfect example that truth is stranger than fiction (and infinitely more enjoyable).

Links

Review (New York Times)

6 Oddball Meetings Between Celebrities (Christian Science Monitor)

Review (New York Journal of Books)

BookSpin Giveaway!

I recently promoted this book here.



The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage
by Graham A. Rayman
Palgrave Macmillan
Hardcover

Palgrave Macmillan has graciously offered 3 copies of The NYPD Tapes to readers of BookSpin.  If you want to be eligible to win, you need to do one of three things:

1.  Retweet my tweet about the giveaway.  If you don't already, you can follow me @Book_Dude.

2.  Comment to this post with your desire to win.

3.  Publicize the giveaway on your Facebook page and email me a link.  My email address is located at the top right of this page.

I will contact the winners to get mailing addresses, no need to include them on your entry.

Good luck!

Many thanks to Rachel from Palgrave Macmillan for her hard work and assistance with this giveaway.

In My TBR Stack:

Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight
by M.E. Thomas
Crown Publishing
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

As M.E. Thomas says of her fellow sociopaths, we are your neighbors, co-workers, and quite possibly the people closest to you: lovers, family, friends. Our risk-seeking behavior and general fearlessness are thrilling, our glibness and charm alluring. Our often quick wit and outside-the-box thinking make us appear intelligent—even brilliant. We climb the corporate ladder faster than the rest, and appear to have limitless self-confidence.  Who are we? We are highly successful, non-criminal sociopaths and we comprise 4% of the American population (that’s 1 in 25 people!). 

 Confessions of a Sociopath takes readers on a journey into the mind of a sociopath, revealing what makes the tick and what that means for the rest of humanity.   Written from the point of view of a diagnosed sociopath, it unveils these men and women who are “hiding in plain sight” for the very first time. Confessions of a Sociopath is part confessional memoir, part primer for the wary. Drawn from Thomas’ own experiences; her popular blog, Sociopathworld.com; and current and historical scientific literature, it reveals just how different – and yet often very similar - sociopaths are from the rest of the world. The book confirms suspicions and debunks myths about sociopathy and is both the memoir of a high-functioning, law-abiding (well, mostly) sociopath and a roadmap – right from the source - for dealing with the sociopath in your life, be it a boss, sibling, parent, spouse, child, neighbor, colleague or friend. As Thomas argues, while sociopaths aren't like everyone else, and it’s true some of them are incredibly dangerous, they are not inherently evil. In fact, they’re potentially more productive and useful to society than neurotypicals or “empaths,” as they fondly like to call “normal” people.  Confessions of a Sociopathdemystifyies sociopathic behavior and provide readers with greater insight on how to respond or react to protect themselves, live among sociopaths without becoming victims, and even beat sociopaths at their own game, through a bit of empathetic cunning and manipulation.

Links 

Review of Confessions of a Sociopath (New York Times)

Article on psychologytoday.com by the author

Patrick Bateman (google it if you need to) reviews Confessions of a Sociopath (slate.com)

Excerpt of Confessions of a Sociopath (businessinsider.com)

Excerpt:

Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate
by Rose George
Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt & Co.
Hardcover

Excerpt from Ninety Percent of Everything:

Introduction


Friday. No sensible sailor goes to sea on the day of the Crucifixion or the journey will be followed by ill-will and malice. So here I am on a Friday in June, looking up at a giant ship that will carry me from this southern English port of Felixstowe to Singapore, for five weeks and 9,288 nautical miles through the pillars of Hercules, pirate waters, and weather. I stop at the bottom of the ship’s gangway, waiting for an escort and stilled and awed by the immensity of this thing, much of her the color of a summer-day sky, so blue; her bottom is painted dull red, her name—Maersk Kendal—written large on her side.

There is such busyness around me. Everything in a modern container port is enormous, overwhelming, crushing. Kendal, of course, but also the thundering trucks, the giant boxes in many colors, the massive gantry cranes that straddle the quay, reaching up ten stories and over to ships that stretch three football pitches in length. There are hardly any humans to be seen. When the journalist Henry Mayhew visited London’s docks in 1849, he found “decayed and bankrupt master butchers, master bakers, publicans, grocers, old soldiers, old sailors, Polish refugees, broken-down gentlemen, discharged lawyers’ clerks, suspended Government clerks, almsmen, pensioners, servants, thieves.” They have long since gone. This is a Terminator terminal, a place where humans are hidden in crane or truck cabs, where everything is clamorous machines.

It took me three train journeys to reach Felixstowe from my northern English home. On one train, where no seats were to be had, I swayed in the vestibule with two men wearing the uniform of a rail freight company. I’m about to leave on a freighter, I said, but a ship. They looked bewildered. A ship? they said. “Why on earth do you want to go to sea?”

Why on earth.

I am an islander who has never been maritime. I don’t sail or dive. I swim, although not in terrifying oceans. But standing here in the noise and industry, looking up almost two hundred feet—higher than Niagara Falls—to the top of Kendal, I feel the giddiness of a Christmas morning child. Some of this is the rush of escape, for which I had reasons. Some is the pull of the sea. And some comes from the knowledge that I am about to embark to a place and space that is usually off-limits and hidden. The public is not allowed on a ship like this, nor even on the dock. There are no ordinary citizens to witness the workings of an industry that is one of the most fundamental to their daily existence. These ships and boxes belong to a business that feeds, clothes, warms, and supplies us. They have fueled if not created globalization. They are the reason behind your cheap T-shirt and reasonably priced television. But who looks behind a television now and sees the ship that brought it? Who cares about the men who steered your breakfast cereal through winter storms? How ironic that the more ships have grown in size and consequence, the less space they take up in our imagination.

The Maritime Foundation, a charity that promotes seafarer matters, recently made a video called Unreported Ocean. It asked the residents of Southampton, a port city in England, how many goods are transported by sea. The answers were varied but uniformly wrong. They all had the interrogative upswing of the unsure.

“Thirty-five percent?”

“Not a lot?”

The answer is, nearly everything. Sometimes on trains I play a numbers game. A woman listening to headphones: 8. A man reading a book: 15. The child in the stroller: at least 4 including the stroller. The game is to reckon how many of our clothes and possessions and food products have been transported by ship. The beads around the woman’s neck; the man’s iPhone and Japanese-made headphones. Her Sri Lanka–made skirt and blouse; his printed-in-China book. I can always go wider, deeper, and in any direction. The fabric of the seats. The rolling stock. The fuel powering the train. The conductor’s uniform; the coffee in my cup; the fruit in my bag. Definitely the fruit, so frequently shipped in refrigerated containers that it has been given its own temperature. Two degrees Celsius is “chill” but 13 degrees is “banana.”

Trade carried by sea has grown fourfold since 1970 and is still growing. In 2011, the 360 commercial ports of the United States took in international goods worth $1.73 trillion, or eighty times the value of all U.S. trade in 1960. There are more than one hundred thousand ships at sea carrying all the solids, liquids, and gases that we need to live. Only six thousand are container vessels like Kendal, but they make up for this small proportion by their dizzying capacity. The biggest container ship can carry fifteen thousand boxes. It can hold 746 million bananas, one for every European on one ship. If the containers of Maersk alone were lined up, they would stretch eleven thousand miles or nearly halfway around the planet. If they were stacked instead, they would be fifteen hundred miles high, 7,530 Eiffel Towers. If Kendal discharged her containers onto trucks, the line of traffic would be sixty miles long.

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. Security concerns have hidden ports further, behind barbed wire and badge wearing and KEEP OUT signs. To reach this quayside in Felixstowe, I had to pass through several gatekeepers and passport controllers, and past radiation-detecting gates often triggered by naturally radioactive cargo such as cat litter and broccoli.

It is harder to wander into the world of shipping, now, so people don’t. The chief of the British navy—who is known as the First Sea Lord, although the army chief is not a Land Lord—says we suffer from “sea blindness” now. We travel by cheap flights, not ocean liners. The sea is a distance to be flown over, a downward backdrop between takeoff and landing, a blue expanse that soothes on the moving flight map as the plane jerks over it. It is for leisure and beaches and fish and chips, not for use or work. Perhaps we believe that everything travels by air, or magically and instantaneously like information (which is actually anchored by cables on the seabed), not by hefty ships that travel more slowly than senior citizens drive.

You could trace the flight of the ocean from our consciousness in the pages of great newspapers. Fifty years ago, the shipping news was news. Cargo departures were reported daily. Now the most necessary business on the planet has mostly been shunted into the pages of specialized trade papers such as Lloyd’s List and the Journal of Commerce, fine publications but out of the reach of most, when an annual subscription to Lloyd’s List costs more than $2,000 a year. In 1965, shipping was so central to daily life in London that when Winston Churchill’s funeral barge left Tower Pier to travel up the Thames, it embarked in front of dock cranes that dipped their jibs, movingly, with respect. The cranes are gone now or immobile, garden furniture for wharves that house costly apartments or indifferent restaurants.

Author Rose George   (photo by Felicity Paxton)

Humans have sent goods by water for four thousand years. In the fifteenth century BC, Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt sent a fleet to the Land of Punt and brought back panther skins and ebony, frankincense and dancing pygmies. Perhaps Hatshepsut counts as the first shipping tycoon, before the Romans, Phoenicians, and Greeks took over (she was certainly the only Egyptian queen who preferred to be called king). Shipping history is full of such treats and treasures. Cardamom, silk, ginger, and gold, ivory and saffron. The Routes of Spice, Tea, and Salt, of Amber and Incense. There were trade winds, sailor towns and sails, chaos and color. Now there are freight routes, turnarounds, and boxes, and the cool mechanics of modern industry, but there is still intrigue and fortune. Maersk ships travel regular routes named Boomerang and Yo Yo (from Australia and Yokohama), or the Bossa Nova and Samba around South America. There are wealthy tycoons still, Norse, Greek, and Danish, belonging to family companies who maintain a level of privacy that makes a Swiss banker seem verbose. Publicly listed shipping companies are still a minority. Even shipping people admit that their industry is clubby, insular, difficult. In this business, it is considered normal that the official Greek shipowners’ association refuses to say how many members it has, because it can.

Maersk is different. It must be, because it is letting me onto a working ship, usually barred to ordinary citizens. Even Maersk officers are no longer permitted to take family members to sea because of concerns about safety from pirates. But Maersk is known for risks, at least in the places where its name is known at all, which is in shipping and Denmark. 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. I like the fact that Maersk is not a household name outside the pages of Lloyd’s List; that it has an online store selling Maersk-branded T-shirts and cookie tins called Stargate, after the company symbol of a seven-point star, white on a background of Maersk Blue, a distinct color that can be created from a Pantone recipe. The star has seven points, goes an employee joke, because they work seven days a week. I like that Maersk is a first name. It’s like a massive global corporation named Derek. For much of recent history the company was run by Arnold Maersk Mc-Kinney Møller, son of the founder, a pleasingly eccentric patriarch who worked until he died in 2012 at age ninety-eight. Mr. Møller was known for his firm control of his firm; for walking up five flights of stairs to his office, although when he reached ninety-four he allowed his driver to carry his briefcase; for being one of only three commoners to receive Denmark’s Order of the Elephant; and for driving around Copenhagen in a modest car although he was one of the two richest people in Denmark. The other inherited Lego.

Reuters, in a profile of Maersk, describes it as “active primarily in the marine transportation sector.” Behind that “primarily” are multitudes. Founded in 1904 with one ship named Svendborg, Maersk—through its subsidiary Maersk Line—now operates the largest container shipping company in the world, with a fleet of six hundred vessels. It also has the vast and dizzying interests of a global corporation. It is active in 130 countries and has 117,000 employees. It is looking for and drilling for oil and gas in Denmark, Angola, Brazil, Greenland, Qatar, Algeria, Norway, Iraq, the United States, and Kazakhstan. If you have visited Denmark, you have probably shopped in a Maersk-owned supermarket. You can save in a Maersk-owned bank. The list of its companies and subsidiaries is twelve pages long, double columns. Its revenues in 2011 were $60.2 billion, only slightly less than Microsoft’s. Microsoft provides the software that runs computers; Maersk brings us the computers. One is infamous. Somehow the other is mostly invisible.

This is remarkable, given the size of its ambition. Maersk is known for its experiments with economies of scale. Its E class ship (according to an internal classification system) Emma Maersk, built in 2005, excited the industry partly because she could carry at least fifteen thousand containers. Triple-E class ships, expected in 2014, will carry eighteen thousand and be able to fit a full-sized American football field, an ice-hockey arena, and a basketball court in their holds, if they care to. Emma was envied by naval architects and engineers, but her arrival in Felixstowe in December 2006 also caught the public imagination. With her 150 tons of New Zealand lamb and 138,000 tins of cat food, she carried 12,800 MP-3 players, 33,000 cocktail shakers, and 2 million Christmas decorations; she became SS Santa, come to call.

SS Santa demonstrated more than industrial hubris. She also proved how little an ordinary citizen understands about shipping. For two weeks afterward, Felixstowe received calls from people wanting to know if she was still in port. She had come and gone in twenty-four hours. I have met well-meaning men—and too few women—in boardrooms across London and New York who complain about this ignorance. They want a more visible image for an industry that in the UK alone employs 634,900 people, contributes £8.45 billion in taxes, and generates 2 percent of the national economy, more than restaurants, takeaway food, and civil engineering combined, and only just behind the construction industry. They despair that shipping draws attention only with drama and disaster: a cruise ship sinking, or an oil spill and blackened birds. They would like people to know the names of the Wec Vermeer, arrived from LeixÕes and heading for Rotterdam, or the Zim Genoa, due in from Ashdod, not just Exxon Valdez and Titanic. They provide statistics showing that the dark days of oil spills are over. Between 1972 and 1981, there were 223 spills. Over the last decade there were 63. Each year, a shipping publicist told me, “More oil is poured down the drain by mechanics changing their engine oil than is spilled by the world’s fleet of oil tankers.”

Yet the invisibility is useful, too. There are few industries as defiantly opaque as shipping. Even offshore bankers have not developed a system as intricately elusive as the flag of convenience, under which ships can fly the flag of a state that has nothing to do with its owner, cargo, crew, or route. Look at the backside of boats and you will see home ports of Panama City and Monrovia, not Le Havre or Hamburg, but neither crew nor ship will have ever been to Liberia or Mongolia, a landlocked country that nonetheless has a shipping fleet. For the International Chamber of Shipping, which thinks “flags of convenience” too pejorative a term (it prefers the sanitized “open registries”), there is “nothing inherently wrong” with this system. A former U.S. Coast Guard commander preferred to call it “managed anarchy.”

Danish-owned Kendal has also flagged out, but to the national registry of the United Kingdom. On her monkey deck she flies the Red Ensign, the British maritime Union flag. This makes her a rarity. After the Second World War, the great powers in shipping were Britain and the United States. They had ships and supplied men to sail them. In 1961 the United Kingdom had 142,462 working seafarers. The United States owned 1,268 ships. Now British seafarers number around 24,000. There are fewer than one hundred oceangoing U.S.-flagged ships. Only 1 percent of trade at U.S. ports travels on an American-flagged ship, and the U.S. fleet has declined by 82 percent since 1951. Who in western Europe or America now knows a working seafarer? At a nautical seminar held on a tall ship—a proper old sailing vessel—in Glasgow, a tanker captain told a story that got laughs, but it was sad. When online forms offer him drop-down options to describe his career, he selects “shipping” and is then given a choice. DHL or Fedex?

Two men have descended from Kendal to fetch me. They look Asian and exhausted, so they are typical crew. 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 medicine.

Seafaring can be a good life. And it can go wrong with the speed of a wave. On paper, the seas are tightly controlled. The Dutch scholar Grotius’s 1609 concept of mare liberum still mostly holds: a free sea that belongs to no state but in which each state has some rights. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is known as the umbrella convention. Its 320 articles, excluding annexes, aim to create “a legal order for the seas and oceans which will facilitate international communication, and will promote the peaceful uses of the seas and oceans, the equitable and efficient utilization of their resources, the conservation of their living resources, and the study, protection and preservation of the marine environment.” Nations that have ratified the convention (the United States has not, not liking its deep-sea mining stipulations) have a right to a twelve-mile boundary from their coastline and also to a two-hundred-mile “exclusive economic zone.” Beyond that is the high sea. The International Maritime Organization, a UN agency, has passed dozens of regulations and amendments since the 1940s to regulate ships, crews, and safety, more than most other UN agencies. The International Labour Organization looks out for seafarers’ rights. For boundary disputes there is an International Tribunal on Maritime Law.

But the sea dissolves paper. In practice, the ocean is the world’s wildest place, because of both its fearsome natural danger and how easy it is out there to slip from the boundaries of law and civilization that seem so firm ashore. TV crime dramas now frequently use ports as a visual shorthand for places of criminal, suspicious activity. I don’t know why they don’t just go out to sea. If something goes wrong in international waters, there is no police force or union official to assist. Imagine you have a problem while on a ship. Who do you complain to, when you are employed by a Manila manning agency on a ship owned by an American, flagged by Panama, managed by a Cypriot, in international waters?
Imagine you are a nineteen-year-old South African woman named Akhona Geveza, fresh out of maritime college, the first in your family to reach higher education, the household earner and hope. In January 2010, you go to sea as a deck cadet—an apprentice navigator—on a good ship run by a good company, the Safmarine Kariba. Six months later, your shipmate reports to the captain that you have been raped by the Ukrainian first officer. He summons you and the officer to his cabin the next day, as if an alleged rape is a regular human resources matter. But you don’t turn up, because you are already dead in the sea off Croatia. The Croatian police subsequently concluded Akhona had committed suicide. She had been in a relationship that was “consensual but rough.” An internal inquiry by Safmarine also concluded suicide and found no evidence of harassment or abuse. And that, according to sea law, was all that could be demanded.

Reporters from South Africa’s Sunday Times then interviewed other cadets from the same maritime school. They found two had been made pregnant by senior officers, two male cadets raped, and a widespread atmosphere of intimidation. A female cadet said embarking on a ship was like being dropped in the middle of a game park. “When we arrived,” another said, “we were told that the captain is our god; he can marry you, baptize you, and even bury you without anybody’s permission. We were told that the sea is no-man’s-land and that what happens at sea stays at sea.”

Other workers and migrants have hard lives. But they have phone lines and Internet access, unlike seafarers. They have union representatives, a police force, all the safety nets of society. Even in space, astronauts are always connected to mission control. Only 12 percent of ship crew have freely available Internet access at sea. Two-thirds have no access at all. Cell phones don’t work either. Lawyers who fight for seafarers’ rights describe their clients as moving targets who work in no-man’s-lands. They describe an industry that is global but also uniquely mobile, and difficult to govern, police, or rule. They are careful to say that most owners are scrupulous, but for the unscrupulous ones there is no better place to be than at sea. For the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), a global union representing four million seafarers, the maritime and fishing industries “continue to allow astonishing abuses of human rights of those working in the sector. . . . Seafarers and fishers are routinely made to work in conditions that would not be acceptable in civilized society.” If that sounds like typically combative union rhetoric, ITF will point to, for a start, the $30 million they recovered in 2010 of wages unpaid to seafarers who had earned them, and the year before was the same. The blankness of that blue sea on our maps applies to the people who work on it, too. Buy your fair-trade coffee beans by all means, but don’t assume fair-trade principles govern the conditions of the men who fetch it to you. You would be mistaken.

In 1904, the great Norwegian-American seafarer unionist Andrew Furuseth—known as Lincoln of the Sea for his cheekbones and achievements—was threatened with prison for violating an injunction during a strike. “You can throw me in jail,” he responded, “but you can’t give me narrower quarters than, as a seaman, I’ve always lived in; or a coarser food than I’ve always eaten, or make me lonelier than I’ve always been.” More than a century on, seafarers still regularly joke that their job is like being in prison with a salary. That is not accurate. When the academic Erol Kahveci surveyed British prison literature while researching conditions at sea, he found that “the provision of leisure, recreation, religious service and communication facilities are better in U.K. prisons than . . . on many ships our respondents worked aboard.”

The International Maritime Organization once published a brochure about shipping entitled “A Safe and Friendly Business.” Shipping has certainly become safer, but not always friendlier to humans or the planet. This safe and friendly business emits as many greenhouses gases as airplanes but is only just being regulated, decades after gas became lead-free and short-haul flights an ethical issue. In this safe and friendly business, at the moment I embark, 544 seafarers are being held hostage by Somali pirates. I try to translate that into other transport industries; 544 bus drivers, or 544 cabdrivers, or nearly two jumbo jets of passengers, mutilated and tortured for years. When thirty-three Chilean miners were trapped underground for sixty-nine days in 2010, there was a media frenzy. Fifteen hundred journalists went to Chile and, even now, the BBC news website maintains a special page on their drama, long after its conclusion. The twenty-four men on MV Iceberg held captive for a thousand days were given no special page and nothing much more than silence and disregard.

The men from Kendal are ready to go. They advise me to hold the gangway rail tightly: One hand for you, Miss, and one for the ship. I have traveled plenty and strangely on land: to Saddam Hussein’s birthday party in Tikrit, to Bhutanese football matches blessed by Buddhist monks, down sewers and through vast slums in great cities. I look at the gangway, leading up four stories of height, my portal to thirty-nine days at sea, six ports, two oceans, five seas, and the most compellingly foreign environment I’m ever likely to encounter. Lead on, able seamen. I will follow.

From the Book NINETY PERCENT OF EVERYTHING: Inside Shipping, The Invisible Industry that Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate by Rose George. Copyright © 2013 by Rose George. Reprinted by arrangement with Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company LLC.

Links

Author website

Author Twitter feed

Book website

Ten Legitimately Fascinating Facts About the Shipping Industry from the Atlantic

How to Load a Giant Container Ship from Wired.com

In My TBR Stack:

Son of a Gun: A Memoir
by Justin St. Germain
Random House

Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001. Debbie St. Germain’s death, apparently at the hands of her fifth husband, is a passing curiosity. “A real-life old West murder mystery,” the local TV announcers intone, while barroom gossips snicker cruelly. But for her twenty-year-old son, Justin St. Germain, the tragedy marks the line that separates his world into before and after. Distancing himself from the legendary town of his childhood, Justin makes another life a world away in San Francisco and achieves all the surface successes that would have filled his mother with pride. Yet years later he’s still sleeping with a loaded rifle under his bed. Ultimately, he is pulled back to the desert landscape of his childhood on a search to make sense of the unfathomable. What made his mother, a onetime army paratrooper, the type of woman who would stand up to any man except the men she was in love with? What led her to move from place to place, man to man, job to job, until finally she found herself in a desperate and deteriorating situation, living on an isolated patch of desert with an unstable ex-cop? Justin’s journey takes him back to the ghost town of Wyatt Earp, to the trailers he and Debbie shared, to the string of stepfathers who were a constant, sometimes threatening presence in his life, to a harsh world on the margins full of men and women all struggling to define what family means. He decides to confront people from his past and delve into the police records in an attempt to make sense of his mother’s life and death. All the while he tries to be the type of man she would have wanted him to be.

Links 

Author website

Author Twitter feed

Review of Son of a Gun from the New York Times

In My TBR Stack:

Do Cool Sh*t: Quit Your Day Job, Start Your Own Business, and Live Happily Ever After
by Miki Agrawal
Harper Business

Hardcover

From the publisher website:

In Do Cool Sh*t, serial social entrepreneur, angel investor, and all-around cool sh*t–doer Miki Agrawal shows how to start a successful company—from brainstorming to raising money to getting press without any connections—all while having a meaningful life! 

With zero experience and no capital, Miki Agrawal opened WILD, a farm-to-table pizzeria in New York City and Las Vegas, partnered up in a children's multimedia company called Super Sprowtz, and launched a patented high-tech underwear business called THINX. 
Miki has seen significant growth in her businesses. She pulls back the curtain of how you can live out loud, honor your hunches, and leave nothing on the table.

Whether you’re a student with big aspirations or an experienced professional looking for new opportunities, Do Cool Sh*t will open your eyes, make you laugh, and give you the confidence to quit your day job, start your own business, and live happily ever after.
Do Cool Sh*t features a foreword by Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos.

Book Description 

An inspiring, irreverent manifesto for those seeking to blaze their own path to entrepreneurship and find fulfillment and happiness through bold action and big ideas.

Have you ever wondered if it's possible to make a career out of something you love? Or how to march through life with a purpose and get the most out of every second? Miki Agrawal, entrepreneur, angel investor, and cool-sh*t-doer, has figured it out. Here Miki shares her own adventures in entrepreneurship and life, from learning to step out of her comfort zone in a foreign country to achieving her dream of playing soccer for the New York Magic to partnering with Tony Hsieh of Zappos.com to launch her dream business.

In Do Cool Sh*t, Miki shows you how to start your own business, fund it on a shoestring budget, convene the perfect group to brainstorm your business plan, test your product, get great (free) press coverage, and more—all while living a life you're proud of. 

Miki pulls back the curtain to reveal how you can live out loud, honor your hunches, and leave nothing on the table. She reminds you that it's cool to care and be excited about ideas and to be proactive; it's cool to mess up; it's cool to work your ass off on something that is meaningful to you; and it's cool to keep trying when the odds are stacked against you. Whether you're about to graduate from college and are wondering what the heck you want to do with your life, or you are in a dead-end job, dreaming about starting your own business, Do Cool Sh*t will make you open your eyes, laugh out loud, and shout, "I can do that!"

Links 

Author website

Author Twitter feed

DoCoolShit.org

Interview with Miki Agrawal on dailycandy.com

Review of Do Cool Shit on nyjournalofbooks.com

On My Radar:

The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage
by Graham A. Rayman
Palgrave Macmillian
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

In May 2010, NYPD officer Adrian Schoolcraft made national headlines when he released a series of secretly recorded audio tapes exposing corruption and abuse at the highest levels of the police department. But, according to a lawsuit filed by Schoolcraft against the City of New York, instead of admitting mistakes and pledging reform Schoolcraft’s superiors forced him into a mental hospital in an effort to discredit the evidence. InThe NYPD Tapes, the reporter who first broke the Schoolcraft story brings his ongoing saga up to date, revealing the rampant abuses that continue in the NYPD today, including warrantless surveillance and systemic harassment. Through this lens, he tells the broader tale of how American law enforcement has for the past thirty years been distorted by a ruthless quest for numbers, in the form of CompStat, the vaunted data-driven accountability system first championed by New York police chief William Bratton and since implemented in police departments across the country. Forced to produce certain crime stats each quarter or face discipline, cops in New York and everywhere else fudged the numbers, robbing actual crime victims of justice and sweeping countless innocents into the police net. Rayman paints a terrifying picture of a system gone wild, and the pitiless fate of the whistleblower who tried to stop it.

Praise

"Adrian Schoolcraft joined the NYPD for old-fashioned reasons, to have a good job while protecting the people. Instead, he ran up against police bosses who cared more about low crime statistics than public safety. That collision, as devastatingly described by Graham Rayman, is a tale of crime prevention turned upside down in the Bloomberg era. Rayman has invented a new genre: the police misprocedural."--Tom Robbins

"Not only has Graham Rayman told the incredible story of Adrian Schoolcraft, whose forced hospitalizaiton by the NYPD in a mental ward is reminiscent of the Sovet Union's KGB, but Rayman puts that sad and frightening incident into a larger context: how the NYPD systemically downgrades crimes to make New York City appear to be safer than it actually is."--Leonard Levitt, author of NYPD Confidential and Conviction 

"Graham Rayman's a great reporter and Adrian Schoolcraft’s story was one of the most gripping things we've ever put on This American Life. The NYPD Tapes tells more of what happened, and reveals the full extent that officials were willing to go in their cover-up.”--Ira Glass, host of public radio’s This American Life

Biography

Graham A. Rayman is a writer for The Village Voice who has covered the New York City Police Department for 17 years. His NYPD Tapes series has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the Polk Award, the Harvard Goldsmith award, and a half-dozen other prizes. Previously, he was at Newsday, covering Ground Zero on the day of the 9/11 attacks and writing about the start of the Iraq War after being embedded with a US Marine Corps. He lives in New York City. 

On My Radar:

Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson
by Jeff Guinn
Simon & Schuster

Hardcover

From the publisher website:

The most authoritative account ever written of how an ordinary juvenile delinquent named Charles Manson became the notorious murderer whose crimes still shock and horrify us today. 

More than forty years ago Charles Manson and his mostly female commune killed nine people, among them the pregnant actress Sharon Tate. It was the culmination of a criminal career that author Jeff Guinn traces back to Manson’s childhood. Guinn interviewed Manson’s sister and cousin, neither of whom had ever previously cooperated with an author. Childhood friends, cellmates, and even some members of the Manson Family have provided new information about Manson’s life. Guinn has made discoveries about the night of the Tate murders, answering unresolved questions, such as why one person on the property where the murders occurred was spared. 

Manson puts the killer in the context of his times, the turbulent late sixties, an era of race riots and street protests when authority in all its forms was under siege. Guinn shows us how Manson created and refined his message to fit the times, persuading confused young women (and a few men) that he had the solutions to their problems. At the same time he used them to pursue his long-standing musical ambitions, relocating to Los Angeles in search of a recording contract. His frustrated ambitions, combined with his bizarre race-war obsession, would have lethal consequences as he convinced his followers to commit heinous murders on successive nights. 

In addition to stunning revelations about Charles Manson, the book contains family photographs never before published.

Links 

Q & A with Jeff Guinn

7 Things You Didn't Know about Charles Manson from the Huffington Post

Charles Manson by Jeff Guinn on NPR

On My Radar:

Undercover Cop: How I Brought Down the Real-Life Sopranos
by Mike Russell with Patrick W. Picciarelli

St. Martins Press / Thomas Dunne Books
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

One moment, New Jersey state trooper Mike Russell was working undercover, playing the role of an up-and-coming mobster hoping to infiltrate a Mafia family crew. The next, he was lying facedown in an alley after being ambushed and shot in the back of the head by a mobster over a dispute.

Russell miraculously healed, and rather than press charges, he maintained his cover. Soon he had a stroke of good luck when he saved a man from an attack by two street thugs. The man he saved turned out to be Andy Gerardo, one of the ranking captains of the Genovese crime family. Quickly earning the trust of his new friend, Russell would orchestrate one of the biggest Mafia takedowns of all time. 

Urged by his police handlers, Russell used his cover story---an ex-cop fired for excessive force who now made his living from an oil-delivery business---and street skills to assimilate into the Genovese crime family in New Jersey, ultimately leading to more than fifty arrests of mobsters, corrupt prison officials, and even a state senator. Straddling the thin line between collecting evidence and participating in the very crimes he was leaking to the cops, Russell consistently placed himself at risk—especially when his police handlers disregarded his wishes and his well-being, conducting premature raids on the gangsters. With his marriage suffering and his family in danger, Russell took extraordinary steps to ensure his financial security and safety, demanding better terms from the police and allowing a film crew to document the final moments of the epic bust for a documentary that was later sold to HBO. 

A real-life version of The Sopranos, Undercover Cop immerses readers in the colorful yet harrowing trials of a standout cop who faced the mob on his own terms, crippled organized crime in New Jersey, and forever redefined undercover law enforcement.

Links 

Mike Russell website

Mike Russell Twitter feed

On My Radar:

Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America

by Dan Balz

Viking Adult / Penguin

Hardcover

From the publisher website:

From the bestselling author of The Battle for America 2008 and longtimeWashington Post correspondent, an inside view and analysis of the Obama-Romney presidential race 

Four years ago, a bright young  presidential candidate named Barack Obama campaigned on a theme of hope and change, and made history. Today, he finds himself in another bitter, divisive presidential race but without the buzzwords. Instead, an embattled president struggles with a dysfunctionally divided Congress, the controversial healthcare bill, a decade-long war, and a stagnant economy. 

Obama’s Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, former corporate tycoon and former governor of Massachusetts,  faces his own controversies in the form of vague policies, fluctuating positions, and questions about his business practices in the private sector. Romney’s personal fortune and business background seemed at odds with the Republican base until he named Wisconsin congressman, Tea Party darling and fiscal conservative Paul Ryan as his running mate. 

Using sources deep inside both campaigns and on the campaign trail through primary and battleground states, Washington Post correspondent Dan Balz writes with a keen political mind and a seasoned reporter’s ear. He traces the highs and lows of the Obama presidency as well as the ruthless Republican primary as both laid the groundwork for one of the most crucial, contentious elections of our time. Collision 2012 puts the race for the White House in context and explores just what the election means for the future of the democratic process and America.

Links

NPR Coverage of Collision 2012 by Dan Balz

Dan Balz on Morning Joe

Dan Balz Twitter Feed

Viking Press website